Hoover Dam

BY DON DEDERA HOOVER DAM

If you happen to pilot an F-15 jet fighter, and you're in the neighborhood, you can do Hoover Dam in one second flat. Or if you're Steve Chubbs, you might stick around for 50 years.

Between those two extremes, about 22 million proud Americans and impressed foreigners have spent some time at Hoover Dam, hiking its stunning overlooks, exploring its concrete galleries, absorbing its mystical technology. On an average of a half-million a year, tourists have poured through Hoover Dam as predictably as water runs downhill. By now they've exposed an acre of Kodachrome, sent home an archive of postcards, and repeated every possible cornball joke, including the perennial favorite: "Will it ever fall down?"

Steve Chubbs himself asks that question of a band of tourists huddled at the base of the dam downstream. They crane their necks up some 700 feet of concrete wall. Chubbs laughs to reassure them: "Don't worry. It won't collapse. I guarantee it. Double your money back if it does."

Chubbs is the only party qualified to issue such an ironclad warranty. As a 22 year old, he hired on as a laborer at 50 cents an hour on Labor Day, 1931. Work on the dam had just begun. Now, into the 52nd year, Chubbs still punches the clock, as a hydrographer and tour guide. Such long service sometimes prompts Chubbs to josh first-time visitors by extending his hand flat from his waist and exclaiming, "Why, I remember when this dam was just a little fellow, about this tall!

Truth to tell, few pioneer eyewitnesses survive of the days before the dam. Wild and free, 1450 miles from the tops of the Rockies to its delta on the Gulf of Cali-fornia, the Colorado River was one of the world's more dangerous. Fur trappers, prospectors, paddlewheel steamboatmen, and farmers cursed El Toro Colorado (The Red Bull), which one day could doze as a trickle and next day stampede out of its banks with reddish brown snowmelt. A flood of 1905-7 left behind a gargantuan puddle: the Salton Sea. In an average year the Colorado transported enough silt to cover the 214-square miles one-foot deep with mud.

Dam the damned? Fair enough, but taming a river capable of carving Grand Canyon called for engineers to dream as never before. And the execution of the final plan required unprecedented feats of architecture, engineering, and construction.

Simply selecting a site was a monumental task. The fledgling Bureau of Reclamation began in 1902 to study 70 possible locations. By 1919 interest focused on Black Canyon, a V-shaped gorge in volcanic rock some 800-feet deep, 300-feet wide at the bottom, and 900-feet across at the top. Diamond-drilling from barges confirmed the soundness of bedrock. In late 1928, Congress authorized the dam. Three years later, a $50 million construction con-tract was signed with a consortium called Six Companies, Inc. The damsite, on the border between Nevada and Arizona, scarcely could be more challenging. The nearest railhead was the village of Las Vegas, 40 miles away. High voltage electricity was no closer than 222 miles. A whole new model town (Boulder City) had to be built. Everything-including a labor force of over 5000-had to be imported. There wasn't even a decent road.

But one by one, the connective links were completed. Six messhalls capable of feeding over a thousand workers at a sitting were erected. To a once-remote desert wilderness came dormitories, mammoth shovels, people-movers to carry 150 workers at a time, two huge concrete mixing plants, and the largest sand-and-gravel screening and washing facility of its kind on Earth.

Daredevils stitched together the walls of the canyon with work bridges, and rock scalers swung like spikers on webs of cables. With rock pick and dynamite, they cleansed the damsite of rubble. Twentyfour hours a day, seven days a week, the bustle intensified; dusty, hot, noisy. Into this beehive dropped the boy/man, Chubbs.

The country was in the grip of the Great Depression. Out of work in Philadelphia, he wrote his uncle, Gus Ayers, chief text continued on page 40 From the first blast to last pour, Hoover Dam construction required a total period of three years and 10 months to complete. Every state participated, sending supplies to complete the job, from near weightless tin cups to steel gates weighing 3 million pounds apiece. Josef Muench photo

(Right) Hoover Dam's power plant is composed of two wings divided equally on the Arizona and Nevada sides of the Colorado River. Combined, the plants' generating units produce upwards of 1.8 million horsepower. Josef Muench photo (Far right) The upriver side of Hoover Dam, from the air. Rugged, surreal, breathtaking, a desolate land of volcanics and, in summer, parching heat. In this uninhabited wilderness, Bureau of Reclamation engineers began work on the Hoover Dam project which, in 1955, was named one of the seven modern civil engineering wonders of the United States. Alan Benoit photo (Bottom) A time exposure photograph of Hoover Dam at night, taken from the Arizona side of the river. The long, curving streaks are automobile headlight beams. Josef Muench photo