April 16, 2019 • 45 mins
It’s one of America’s biggest accomplishments in the 20th century, a slab of concrete holding back one of the country’s most finicky rivers, providing water and electricity to a swath of majors cities that otherwise couldn’t exist.
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:01):
Welcome to Stuff You Should Know, a production of My
Heart Radios How Stuff Works. Hey, and welcome to the podcast.
I'm Josh Clark, Who's Charles Chuck Bryant, And there's Jerry
Roland over there. And if you put all three of
us together you get a little something called Stuff you
(00:23):
Should Know. Oh, Man, Damn, Hoover Damn edition. Have you
ever been to Hoover Damn? I have been there twice show.
Yeah I went. Um, I went in Oh the great
(00:44):
Hoover Damn Tour of it was either or Man, it
may have been nine. Almost cussed right then? Yeah, I
heard that. I almost did that the other day to
getting to a movie crushy. Um. It may have been
eighty nine or ninety. It was when I went out
to visit my brother when he lived in l A.
(01:05):
And we met in Las Vegas, drove down to the
Hoover dam and then back to l A. The first
time you guys met, Yeah, it was great. Uh. And
then I went again in ninety six for sure, ninety
six and okay, I think both times I took the tour. Uh.
And it's have you ever been? It's really something else. Yeah,
(01:27):
for the first time you me and I went about
a year ago. Um, we drove from uh Scottsdale to
Vegas and stopped in Hoover Dam on the way and
it was great, as you do, it was very very cool. Well,
there's nothing, nothing, nothing nothing. Hoover Damn, Vegas is kind
of how it goes. Yeah, and you know, we'll get
(01:48):
to the water levels. But it's uh, it's startling from
when I was there what it looks like now. Yeah,
I can imagine like if you had gone any time
before about two thousand. From what I understand, it's like
a different, different place. But the damn still there and
it's still intact and doing really well. You got that
at least, right, it's just the ecological catastrophe that's kind
(02:11):
of looming that kind of is a downer. That's right.
And we should give a big shout out to Julia Layton,
who used to be one of the great great writers
for how Stuff Works dot com back when we were
uh still associated with that website. I think she might
still write for him occasionally. Really well, she's great and
(02:33):
now we are commissioning some articles from her, and boy,
she's good, Yes she is. So what's her nickname? Chuck
the lates Julia Layton. Late's no, because that sounds like
she's not tardy. Oh yeah, that's right. Um, let's just
call her Dr Layton. Okay, there you go. Although I
don't think she's a doctor, but she does have her
(02:55):
masters in writing, that's right, So way better than me.
She cranks out some good stuff, that's right. So thanks, Julia,
I'm glad you called that out, Chuck. Well done. So
let's go back, shall we to a time in the
the little the little area of the southwestern United States
where Arizona reaches out to hug Nevada, Nevada. Which way
(03:20):
are we supposed to say it? Well, we're supposed to
say Nevada, but we're not from there, so we'll say Nevada,
right like everybody else, right, Um. And where they almost meet,
there's a little gorge. There's a canyon. Well there's a
lot of canyons, but there's one in particular, and it's
called Boulder Canyon. And if you went to Boulder Canyon
(03:41):
today to find the Hoover Dam, you would be s
o l because while they're originally going to build the
Hoover Dam at Boulder Canyon, so much so that the
name of the project for the first decade or so
it was called the Boulder Boulder Dam just Bold Boulder once,
not two Boulders, the Boulder Dam project. Um, they actually
(04:01):
moved it a little further upstream to a much more
suitable site called Black Canyon. And if you go visit
the Hoover Dam today, that's where you're actually going. It's
Black Canyon where Nevada and Arizona almost meat, that's right.
And um, this idea was conceived, this concrete gravity arch
(04:22):
hydro electric dam, hydro electric almost almost high dough electric.
Excuse me. Uh, this was all conceived because well, for
three reasons plus a cherry on top. One is that
the Colorado River had a had a bad habit of
(04:44):
flooding and causing lots of devastation. Just a nasty boy,
so too to lasso that that beast. Uh. Number Two,
to create water in times of drought, as you know,
creating a big reservoir that would be like mead uh,
to create energy. I love things that kill all these birds,
you know, so many dead birds. Uh. And then finally
(05:08):
the little cherry on top. Those were the three big
reasons they did it. But the cherry on top. It
turns out has been like me tourism is huge. Yeah,
I think like Mead was the first nationally designated recreation area. Yeah.
It sounds almost Soviet, doesn't it. Like the government's like
this is where you recreate on this particular designated lake.
(05:30):
Travel to the fund zone. So um yeah, the first one.
I think there's like this. This is the nineteen twenties,
I think when the project is really starting to gain
steam and the guy who was this Secretary of Commerce
at the time, who Herbert Hoover, who would very soon
be the President of the United States, who would very
(05:51):
shortly after that be like the most hated man in America.
Hoover was like, this is a great idea. There's like
this whole spot of land down in the Lower United States,
and it just wants to be so much more than
it than it is. It wants to be cropland, it
wants to be cattle pasture. It wants to be a
big old city like l A or Vegas. They're just
(06:13):
waiting to pop, but they really are having trouble with
water and with flooding. Like it's it's weird. It's like
the Colorado River would be like not enough, sorry, and
then up too much, way more than you ever wanted.
And because of this kind of mercurial nature of it,
there was just not a lot that could be done
with the Southwest unless you figured out a way to
(06:34):
tame that that river. And you know, like you were saying,
that's what the Hoover dam was originally intended to do,
and that's definitely what it did. I mean, just to
kind of let the cat out of the bag early. Um,
it was successful as far as damn projects go. Yeah,
And just to clear something up when you just said
Herbert Hoover said big cities like l A and Vegas,
(06:57):
he had a crystal ball on Vegas because Vegas was
cowtown back then. Yeah, population five thousand at around ninety. Yeah,
Vegas didn't people didn't want to go there until gambling
started happening. They did have gambling. They had gambling, they
had prostitution, they had yes, they had drinking. I guess
(07:18):
casinos thanks to h what's his name, Buggsy. Yeah, Bugsy
was one of the first, wouldn't he. I think so
he wasn't the first, was he? I mean I saw
that movie and if I remember correctly, Warren Beatty built
that Flamingo casino and hotel, and that was kind of
the first major casino. If I'm not mistaken, that sounds
(07:40):
like a guy who deserves his own episode of stuff.
You should know who Bugsy or or Warren Beatty. But
Bugsy okay, Warren Beatty maybe gets the short stuff. So,
uh the cup man, what a cut burn. It's better
than just ignoring his existence and something's uh. So the
Colorado River, like we said, um, it's the seventh longest
(08:04):
in the US, about close to fift miles of total flow,
and I believe that it distributes water that the river
itself and then its tributaries to about million people. Of
the crops in the US and of the livestock drink
(08:24):
its water in the United States. It does now. So
before this, before the Hoover Dam project, when the Colorado
just did whatever the Colorado wanted to do. It's not
like the people of the Southwest had had not tried
to tame it before. They had extensive irrigation canals and
ditches and dikes and earthworks and everything they could think
(08:48):
of to keep the river going this way or that
way and to keep it from flooding, and none of
it worked. I mean it would work some like yes,
an irrigation canal would work and you could here get
your crops. But eventually the river was gonna flood and
because you had diverted the river towards your crop land,
when it flooded, it flooded that irrigation ditch, and it
flooded your crop land to which was a real problem
(09:10):
for you because it would when eventually it would recede um,
you might have a lot more dirt than you're used to,
probably pretty fertile dirt, but your crops would be gone.
Maybe some of your cows got carried away, you might
have lost your ten gallon hat. It's not a good
deal when your crop land gets flooded. And so this
was kind of what was going on when they were
trying to tame the Colorado. It was just way too
(09:32):
big of a project for you know, a handful of
even large scale farmers to take on, which was one
reason why the federal government stepped in because at the
time there was really no entity that could take on
a project like this, And even then there were a
lot of questions like I'm not even sure the U. S.
Government can handle this kind of thing. And the government said, oh, well, watch,
(09:55):
watch and learn suckers. Yeah. So it's when uh US
Bureau of Reclamation said, all right, I think we can
build a dam of all dams. Um, we're gonna make
it a gravity arch design. I think that can handle
the Colorado River. And we're gonna have tunnels and turbines
and towers, and we're gonna prevent flooding, and we're gonna
(10:19):
deliver water to people. And the best news is we're
going to create well, all that's great news, but more
great news is we're going to create energy for a
ton of people, such that this thing will even pay
for itself in fifty years time. And like you said,
a lot of people, I mean, this was and a
lot of people are like, I don't Even engineers were saying,
(10:41):
I don't know if this is possible, right, And so
not only were people incredulous that it was even possible,
there's some seven states that draw water from the Colorado River,
which is a pretty long river. It goes it starts
in the Rocky Mountains, that's where it's fed by snow
melt up there, and then it goes all the way
down to Mexico and so seven states lay claim on water.
(11:05):
They need water from the Colorado River to live, to
irriget their crops, to feed their livestock. It's the kind
of like the main artery for life in in the Southwest,
or one of them. And when they found out that
people in the seven States found out the US government
was was wanting to damn and control the river, they
got really worried that really this was just a project
(11:27):
to divert all that beautiful water over to California. Because
California had it going on by the late twenties, you know,
the early mid twenties already thanks to Los Angeles, thanks
to well, thanks to Los Angeles, UM. But it had
a lot of potential, and it was growing San Francisco
to it was it. It was growing in between those two,
those two cities. And so the people in like New
(11:50):
Mexico and Colorado and Arizona and Nevada were really worried
that this was really just the federal government stepping in
and saying, thanks a lot, we're gonna take this water
and send it off to California, and um. Herbert Hoover
actually intervened and said no, no no, no, how about this.
Before we even get this project underway, we will broker
a deal for how the water from the Colorado River
(12:12):
gets distributed. And I'm Herbert Hoover. I'm going to be
the most hated man in the world. So I'm going
to actually purposely inflate the the capacity that this reservoir
will hold so that no one feels like they're they're
going to get left out. And everybody ended up signing on.
So that was technically step negative one or maybe step
zero before the plan was even fully adopted by the government. Yeah,
(12:38):
and it was called the Colorado River Compact. And again
it was just to make I think the only ones
you left out were Utah and Wyoming and then the
other five. Um. And they said, all right, the way
you a portion, it looks good to us. California is like,
we all know that we're really going to get the
most water, right, and it was like, totally don't worry about.
(13:00):
Everyone's gonna hate me soon and many people will hate
California one day too. Um. And so Congress said, this
looks great, let's push forward. Uh, despite the fact, I
don't think we mentioned yet that the private sector. Of course,
I mean, if you think the private sector and the
government have been it's like a newish thing that they're
arguing over stuff like this. Think again, because since the
(13:22):
dawn of time in the United States, the government and
the private sector have squabbled, and so obviously private power
companies and and water companies and just everybody was like, geez,
I don't like the sounds of this, like the government's
gonna start getting into the electricity business. Um. But regardless,
they had no choice. Congress approved the Boulder Dam project,
(13:46):
like you said, that later moved to Black Canyon, and
for many, many years it was kind of bounced back
and forth between Boulder Dam and then Hoover Dam. Uh.
They officially called it Hoover Dam in nineteen thirty one,
but like you said, four times, Hoover people didn't like
him when he left office, so they went, let's call
(14:07):
it the Boulder Dam again. And then it took a
congressional resolution in nineteen seven to finally bring it back
and give Hoover his due right. The reason why people
hated Hoover, especially right after he left office, like he
was a super conservative president. He believed that the federal
government should intervene in business and in personal affairs as
(14:29):
little as possible. So in the grips the worst parts
of the Great Depression, the greatest economic recession that's ever
hit the world, he was literally vetoing bills that would
give federal assistance to Americans. So he was very much
hated and reviled by the average person and just about
everybody when he when he was soundly defeated by FDR,
(14:53):
I think in nineteen thirty two. That sounded so uneasy
in nineteen thirty ish to election. So obviously, if you're
gonna undertake a project in award contracts to two companies
to build this thing, there's probably not one company that
(15:14):
can tackle something like this that has all the different
UH skills necessary to build something like the Hoover Dam.
So UH six actually companies, six big big construction firms
got together and UH formed what was called, wait for it,
the six Companies right in nineteen thirty one, and they
(15:35):
served as the kind of UH mega construction firm that
undertook this huge, huge project. Yeah, they bid the project
out at like forty eight point eight million dollars um,
which is so funny to think about now, Like it's
a little money for something like this. Yeah, even when
you adjust for inflation, it's still a surprisingly low amount.
(15:57):
It comes out to about eight hundred million dollars. And
it's like the federal government today spends billion dollars like
it's nothing. This is like a huge deal that the
federal government government was spending the equivalent of today's eight
hundred million dollars. But one reason why they went with
the six companies consortium is because the Bureau of Reclamation
this is the department that oversaw the project. Um, they
(16:20):
had calculated the costs themselves, and the six companies bid
was only about twenty four thousand dollars more than the
six company or than the Bureau of Reclamation had estimated
the project would cost about twenty four grand over right,
So they were like, all right, if you want to
build this whole project for dollars have added UM. And
(16:44):
I mean obviously they were six legitimate major construction companies
and then all of them combined together form one super
construction company. UM. So they seem to be pretty comfortable
with this consortium. And from everything I can tell, unless
you're a workers rights kind of person, um, this this company.
Their faith in this consortium was well placed because they
(17:05):
did a pretty good job, saving maybe one major mistake, um,
which we'll get too later. It was it's a pretty
good government construction project if you ask me, public private,
all right, UM, I feel like we should take a
break now and come back and talk about, uh, infrastructure
(17:26):
right for this. All right, So we're back and uh
it will take a couple of years. Obviously, you're not
going to dive into a project like this right away
(17:46):
because you can't back then because of where it was located.
And if you think about it, um, like part of
the problem with this project from the beginning was its
location and how isolated the Southwest was from other like
major parts of the U S at the time. And
so they were like, wait a minute, we're not close
(18:07):
to anything Like Vegas only is the closest place and
it has five thousand people. That doesn't really help us much.
It's like, you know, miles away. So here's what we're
gonna have to do. Um, we're gonna have to build
a town that's really close by for all of our
employees and our workers to live. And so they did
(18:27):
just that. I think this was about six miles away.
They literally constructed a city called Boulder, city, UM west
of the damn site. It had seven fifty eight cottages
if you were married and worked or had a family
or whatever. It had nine dormitories for single men. I
(18:48):
imagine that was a wild scene. Uh. They had a hospital,
they had a department store, they had laundry, they had
a school, they had a post office, they had uh
liquor stills and and that's real illegal by the way.
Sure of course this depression or prohibition, UM, but they
needed their booze, like, let's be honest. Uh. And this
(19:10):
this city actually remained under government control until nineteen fifty nine,
when uh it got its own incorporation, which is kind
of crazy. Yeah, the the the Hoover Damn was dedicated,
like the project was done basically UM by nineteen thirty eight, Um,
nineteen thirty nine. I think they're still working on outbuildings
(19:31):
and stuff for a little while. But for twenty years
after a lot of the people who had UM built
the damn were like, I really like this Bowlder City town.
I'm gonna stay here. And one of the reasons why
you would stay there is because like the government ran
the town. There were no elected officials. There was an
appointed Bureau of Reclamation, um department, uh like administrator that
(19:55):
was like the de facto mayor of the town. And
like if there was something wrong with your house, You're
of Reclamation workers would come fix it, like your sink
or paint your house or whatever. You didn't have to
do anything because the government this is like federal land.
And finally in nineteen what'd you say, the government was like,
all right, freeloaders, you can paint your own houses from
(20:17):
now on. This is your place. And they incorporated it
into a city in nineteen sixty, I guess, yeah, And
it's uh still one of two cities in Nevada that
say no gambling here, which is pretty unique. You know.
At the at the height of this project to Chuck
Bowlder City, which hadn't existed just a couple of years before.
Like it wasn't like they took over an existing city
and built it up. There was nothing there before and
(20:39):
they built a city from scratch. Um it was. It
had the biggest population in Nevada at the time. Yeah,
more than Vegas. Yeah, by by a few hundred people,
I believe. All right, so they built I mean this
is keep in mind again, this before they can even
get started on this dam. They say, we gotta build
a city. We gotta build um seven miles of highway,
(21:01):
we gotta build twenty three miles of railway, we got
to build um bring in like two miles of power lines,
and we have to bring in cableways spanning this canyon.
And it's just all this massive amounts of infrastructure to
tackle this project where they were gonna be paying dudes
(21:21):
fifty cents to a dollar an hour, which is between
eight bucks and twenty bucks an hour in today dollars. Right,
what's ironic is the harder and the more dangerous your
job typically the less you were paid, kind of like
today kind of. Yeah, there was there is a group
(21:42):
called the muckers, and they were the ones who had
to like get the stone in the sludge and all
that stuff out of the canyon bottom. And um, they
got paid the least even though they were the most
um exposed to like falling rocks and falling items, and
apparently like falling stuff was a real danger on this project. Yeah,
(22:03):
well we'll get to that later, but a lot of
noggins suffered. Um, So then the other thing that they
had to do, they're like all right, we got the
city built, we got all these highways, We've got all
this stuff, We've got all these people. We got a
good plan. They're like, we need to do something with
this river because you can't. You can't just start stacking
rocks and divert the Colorado River. So they literally had
(22:27):
to come up with a plan to reroute the Colorado
River while they built this thing. I hadn't thought about that.
I'm sure you knew about it two times over from
your double visits and the tour. Now, did you just
drive across it? No, we walked around. We didn't take
one of these sexual like tours, tours like it was
seventeen bucks, right, Like, I'm sure I know as much
(22:51):
as this guy. Um, but no, No, I mean like
we took out the whole thing and we were there
for a couple of hours or anything. But it was
self guided to her, How about that got you? No,
that's great, but it had never occurred to me. And
I didn't learn on this self guided tour that we
just made up ourselves. Um, that that that you would
have to divert the river, that the river was still
going through um Black Canyon at the time. Um, and
(23:14):
you just couldn't build a damn there while the river
was trying to get through there. There's a lot of
stuff you could do so to to divert the river. Um,
they did some really ingenious stuff. And if you step
back and look at it from like the eyes of
a like like a child, it's really just too three
four steps and building this damn if you really look
(23:36):
at a super high level or super I guess childlike again,
um in all of them make total sense. But just
the audacity of saying, yeah, we can do that, Yeah,
add that extra step on before we get started. It's
it really kind of goes to the heart of like,
just what an amazing civil engineering project this was. So
(23:56):
like with any damn, if you want to divert that water,
you're gonna have to go up straight a certain amount,
and they have very smart engineers that figure out exactly
where to do this. And in this case they built
uh Coffer dams, which is a very common thing to
do when you want to build a damn downstream. It's
basically sort of like a big hole in the river
that uh the water would just flow into these. So
(24:20):
the water instead of going downstream, dumps into these Coffer Dams,
and then it funnels that water into these four tunnels,
two on each side of the canyon under the canyon,
instead of between them, diverting everything around to then rejoin
uh the other you know, those those tunnels rejoin each
other as the Colorado River once again downstream, right. And
(24:44):
I think the Coffer Dam is actually kind of like
a like an earthworks, like a wall inside the water.
Yeah you will, you pump the water out, you kind
of make it a hole. But yeah, so so this
these tunnels that they diverted this too, Chuck, where it
combined four miles four miles of tunnel, so each each
(25:05):
tunnel was about a mile because there are four of
them through the canyon rock which was granite. And they
dug out these tunnels as and built the Coffer Dam
just to start the whole thing, not as part of
the larger project, but this is like to to just
to get started. That was the first thing they had
to do. Yeah, there were fifty ft in diameter, like
(25:26):
these were not small tunnels. They had to be lined
with three feet of concrete to hold up. And I
think the water was was racing through those at a
rate of two hundred thousand cubic feet per second. So
it's amazing. That's a hundred and thirty six um Olympic
sized pools per minute passing through there. Yeah, I mean
(25:49):
this would be remarkable today, dude. Yeah, you know for sure.
And as we'll see those those things are still in operation,
although they use them differently now. Um, but yeah, that
that's that's just a ton of water. And and they said, yep, success,
it worked. We diverted um this water down further downstream
because you know, the tunnels ended below the damn project
(26:10):
site and then all of a sudden, the Colorado River
had been diverted around the dam and now they could
get started, right, And so they're like, all right, we
feel like we could just quit now because what we
did was pretty awesome. But we don't have a damn yet.
So in this huge canyon, we need, uh, if we're
gonna build a dam, we need to make these walls
(26:31):
smooth because they were you know, it was a canyon.
It was just jagged rock and you can't just fill
in a bunch of concrete against this jagged rock. They
have these abutments that are gonna secure this huge concrete
slab to the canyon walls. So they had to smooth
these things out, and that was done by I mean,
I want to say the most dangerous job, but it's
(26:53):
kind of hard to pick. But the high scale ers
are definitely up there as far as danger goes. If
you go to the Hoover Dam site today, there's a
statue of a high scaler. It's a guy like on
a rope with like a toolbag hanging from me. He's
like scaling down the side of the uh, the canyon wall.
And that's exactly what they did. Because if you're trying
(27:15):
to clear the canyon walls and you're talking, you know,
your seven hundred feet up between the bottom of the
canyon and the canyon rim, You've got a lot of
rock that you're trying to get out of there. Um,
it's not easy. You can't just you know, hit it
with a pole and priyate loose. You get to blast
it loose, actually sure, but to no avail. They spent
(27:38):
a good year and a half trying that and nothing happened. Um,
but the uh I'm totally joking about that, by the way, Um, Okay,
to to blast it the chuck, you have to drill
a hole and then put the dynamite in and then
blast it. But if you're trying to drill a wholesomewhere,
you know, halfway between the canyon ridge and the canyon bottom,
(27:58):
you have to have a guy on a rope who
is willing to swing down there, have a jackhammer four
pound jackhammer lowered to him, and then it drill a
hole with a jackhammer suspended from the edge of the
canyon um into the into the mid air um and
then pack it full of dynamite. Light it, get out
(28:18):
of the way, let the blast happen, and then come
back and then use a pole to private rocks loose.
That's what these guys had to do. And if you
want to know how Jackhammers work, everybody, let me tell you.
We have maybe our best episode ever in eleven years.
Jack It was the worst one we've ever done. Like
there's no question, Like the sun ha ha, you know
(28:40):
it was terrible. Jackhammers was actually bad. At least the
son's an interesting thing, right A right, good point. Um,
All right, so they're they're blasting these things out. These dudes, uh,
believe it or not, did not even have hard hats
at the time. They were not supplied with hard hats. No.
That's one big criticis some of the six six Companies
(29:01):
consortium that they did not care about workers, right. So
there was a strike that happened in and the guy
running the show for the six companies name was Frank Crow.
They called him hurry up Crow. Um, he fired everybody.
He just fired everybody and brought in new workers. They
didn't get hard hats until they basically said, we're not
gonna work anymore unless you give us hard hats. They
(29:22):
had to make their own hard hats by taking soft hats,
which I guess it's just a hat, and then putting
it in like coal tar and letting it like molten
coal tar, and then letting it cool, and all of
a sudden you had like a homemade hard hat. And
then finally the company is just like, all right, you're
making us look bad. We'll we'll get some actual ones.
But it took like a little while before they had
(29:43):
any any actual hard hats on site. Yeah, those homemade
ones are called hard boiled hats, and they really actually
worked that. Um. I know that thing you sent said
that some of the rocks falling on these hard boiled hats.
Their their head would be fine, but it would be
such force that would actually break their jaw. So these
they worked, these hard bowl hats actually worked, um, but
(30:06):
I imagine they wanted the real thing. You'd be like
if I don't think though, And they would do tricks
and stuff like in their downtime they would you know,
a lot of these people were I mean not a lot,
but some of them were like circus workers, right, and
people like former military that could do this kind of thing.
And apparently between working they would fly around and do little,
(30:30):
uh high wire tricks and stuff basically, and Native Americans too,
And you always hear about when the skyscrapers were built,
they'd be like, yeah, we just hired a bunch of
Native Americans and they'll run all over steel beams as
much as you please without any fear. And I've always
wondered why that's the case, and is it is it?
It's got to just be some sweeping generalization that Native
(30:50):
Americans aren't afraid of heights, obviously, but like, are there
specific tribes that were exposed to things like cliff walls
for generations and generations and that they became used to
these dizzy heights so that it wasn't a big deal.
And those are the same tribes that you know made
their way out to New York to build the skyscrapers too.
We gotta get to the bottom of that one. Or
(31:11):
maybe they were just tough and not scared of anything.
They just didn't let on. But there we have to.
We have to tell this once, the story of Burrel
Our Rutledge, though, man like like, I almost faint just
just reading about it. I'm sure because you don't love heights. No,
I don't love heights. So let's just go over this
one more time. If you were in the canyon rim
(31:32):
of the the Boulder Damn Hoover Dam project at the time,
you were more than seven feet above the bottom of
the canyon, which for all intents and purposes, is straight down.
That's like a sixty story building. Basically, it's a really
really big height and you can sense it, man, when
you're there, and Hoover Dam, if you haven't been, go
(31:54):
it's totally worth the trip for sure, um, especially if
you're in Las Vegas. Um. But there was a guy
named Burl Rutledge who was one of the engineers for
the Bureau of Reclamation, and I guess he lost his
footing or something and he fell off off the canyon
rim on his way down to the canyon bottom a
(32:15):
sixty story building below him, that's right. And then thankfully,
um he either had a a former circus worker or
somebody who was just very brave named Oliver Cowen about
below apparently heard this, I guess it calls a bit
of a commotion and swung himself out. He's hanging in
(32:35):
a it's called abortion seat that's like sort of like
a little sling seat. He rushes over as fast as
he can go, swinging out and grabs this guy's leg
as he's sliding down the canyon wall. And then another
high scaler named Arnold Parks then swings over, you know,
helps him pin his body to the wall, and they
held him there until they could drop a line and
(32:57):
pull him up. If I were Rutledge, I would have
been like, like, just let me go, let me go.
I can't stand this. I'm so scared. They're like, Josh,
we've really got you. You know. You're like it's all over.
I'm never going to be the same again. Well, that's
probably true. You would just moved to the to the
lowest place in the continuous contiguous United States. I can't
(33:21):
imagine what the rest of Burl Rutledge's day was after that,
but it was good. I bet he drank a lot.
I hope it was a good day. But yeah, So
that happened like that, like the thing that everyone's imagination
thinks of when you think of a bunch of people
doing construction work on a canyon. Ledge, that happened, and
it actually panned out pretty well for Burl Rutledge at least.
(33:43):
All right, man, I think it's time for a message break, agreed,
all right? So do are dying? Though? Um? I saw
anywhere between like ninety three to ninety six to a
(34:05):
hundred people died total in the whole project, which, all
things being equal, for what they were doing, isn't that
high of a number. Um A hundred lives is a
lot though to be lost on a specific engineering project. Yeah,
I saw as high as a hundred and twelve. And
the six companies, again, they weren't exactly known for having
(34:25):
like the loosest pockets. If you file the some sort
of health claim against them for you know, an injury
or an illness sustained working on the job, there was Um.
I think like thirty six forty two people associated with
the project died of pneumonia. But I think the Las
Vegas Star did an investigation either years later at the
(34:47):
time and said there were basically no deaths back at
Boulder City of pneumonia. If there was pneumonia, it would
have been going around Boulder City. And we think that
really pneumonia is just a code word from the six
companies or carbon monoxide poison because the six companies wanted
to cover it up so they didn't didn't have to
pay out any you know, money to the family because
(35:09):
they accidentally killed the dad with carbon monoxide poisoning because
he was working all day alongside like a diesel engine
in one of these you know, mile long tunnels. Yeah,
so that was the kind of stuff that they endured. Um.
Heat stroke killed a lot of people too. Oh yeah,
in the summer of nine three alone, apparently about three
(35:29):
people per week. We're dying a pete stroke because dude
in in the sun in these tunnels in particular, apparently
would get up to a hundred and forty degrees fahrenheit,
which is some ungodly amount and celsius too, and then
in the shade. On the worst days, it would get
to like a hundred and twenty degrees in the shade.
(35:50):
It's a dry heat though. Sure it's not the heat,
it's the humidity unless it's a hundred and twenty and
then it doesn't matter. Yeah, And one of the common
um urban legends is that there are dead bodies um
in the concrete of Hoover Damn. That is not true,
and I love how Julia put it. Common decency aside.
(36:10):
She says it would have compromised the structural integrity. So
they they had to fish these bodies out, because if
you were a body in concrete, you're gonna decompose eventually,
and that's gonna leave bubbles and introduce gas into the concrete,
and that's going to weaken the structure. So they had
to fish all these bodies out and even still well
we'll talk about the concrete next, but just just to
(36:31):
kind of lay the foundation for this point, feel forgive
the punt you when they when they poured a bucket's
worth of concrete to build the damn face there the
damn itself, I guess um the dam was so enormous
that the whole bucket only raised the level of concrete
by like two to six inches, depending on the block
(36:52):
they were pouring. So if you fell into the concrete,
you were you fell into two inches of concrete basically,
So you were you were you were going to get
lost in the concrete or anything like that. And then
on top of that, yet they even if they did
not care about whether you spent eternity entombed, they would
be like, well, you're not gonna You're not gonna screw
with the integrity of our damn So, yes, there's no
(37:15):
dead bodies in there, no dead bodies. So so let's
talk about the concrete, shall we, real quick? Yeah? Um,
So at this point, the walls are clean and smooth.
They've got these abutments in place, which, by the way,
if I may, okay, So I looked all over for
the abutments, and all I ever saw was it's the
(37:35):
it's the walls of the canyon, the rock walls of
the canyon, or the abutments from what I can gather. Um,
you know how when you when you grab somebody nicely
and in jokingly by the shoulders right and are holding
them securely like this, right, so you've got your thumbs
on the front of their arms, and you've got their
fingers on the back of their arms like that, right,
(37:58):
your fingers and thumbs are acting as abutments. And so
the abutments that are holding rather than this poor sap
who again you're just joking around with um, rather than
than that person, these abutments are the canyon walls holding
the damn itself in places. Okay, I mean I had,
(38:19):
but like I couldn't tell if they were like parts
of that stuck out of the damn or parts that
stuck out of the canyon walls. And I don't know.
Maybe it was one of those things where everybody else
knows what abutments is, and that's why no one went
to the trouble of explaining it. But I couldn't find
it like spelled out or a good picture saying here's
(38:40):
the abutments. So I just assumed that no one else
knew and I was the only one digging into it.
But now I feel like my eyes have been open. Well,
I have the three fake teeth and implants, so I
know what abutments are. They go, that was it's different
in your teeth but not really the same word, same function, right,
So these abutments are in place, and they were like,
(39:02):
all right, we gotta start pouring some concrete. The design itself, Um,
a lot of damns use this design. It's called a
gravity arch, and it's basically just using the natural pressure
of of the land to uh kind of force everything
tight into that uh tightened down that concrete between those
(39:23):
two canyons. Yeah, it's really ingenious, dude. It's it's just
like an arched bridge where gravity presses down on the arch,
which makes the arch press in to say, like the
walls of the canyon that the bridge is crossing, and
the bridge the walls of the canyon pushed back, which
only strengthens the bridge. Same exact thing. It's like if
you took a bridge at arch bridge and put it
(39:46):
on its side. That's what the Hoover dam is. So
when the water presses into that curve of the arch,
it tries to straighten the dam, which presses the damn
into the sides of the canyon walls, which press back
strengthens the damn. It's ingenious, ingenious, I tell you, yeah,
And so uh they didn't even need that. That's kind
(40:08):
of the funny part about all of this there's so
much concrete that it could have been a flat slab,
which a lot of damns are, but um, apparently engineers
thought that would freak people out to have a flat
slab damn that big, and so they said, let's just
curve it anyway, because everyone understands basic physics, right, all right,
(40:29):
and it looks cool and it does look very cool. Um, alright,
so we're we're actually finally to the concrete. Um. There
are three point two five million cubic yards of concrete
that make up the Hoover dam, uh and then another
one point one one million cubic yards and um, it's
(40:50):
not just the damn face. There's a lot of you know,
the houses, a power plant and all these outlying structures,
and five million barrels of cement. Five million barrels went
into mixing all this concrete, which they mixed on site, uh,
sen in rail cars hoisted down on these cableways that
they had built. And every seventy eight seconds, these workers
(41:14):
would get a new bucket of concrete to poor right
right for um until about five ft of the dam
had been poured, and then after that they had to
stop for seventy two hours to let it cure, because
curing is a huge part when you're working with concrete.
If it doesn't cure right, then the stuff inside is
going to take longer to cure than the stuff outside.
(41:36):
Um which isn't that big of a deal if you're
pouring like you know, a driveway in a house or
something like that. But when you're pouring a dam that
has to have like really exact dimensions, you have to
keep the outside and the inside curing at about the
same rate. So they came up with this really ingenious
um way to cure this concrete really fast. And they
(41:57):
ran pipes, steel pipes all through all the concrete that
they poured, So there's steel pipes running all over the
Hoover dam inside of it, and they cooled water on
site to like like just above freezing, and they pumped
it through these pipes so that when they were pouring concrete,
the concrete was being cooled internally and they were spraying
(42:17):
it with water on the outside too, So it was
curing at about the same rate inside as it was outside,
and it was curing fast in about seventy two hours,
where if they had poured a slab that if they
poured the Hoover Dam in one big slab had just
left it, first of all, it would have been all
messed up all kinds of ways. But it also would
have taken about a hundred and twenty five years to
(42:39):
cure fully on its own. It'd still be curing now.
But they get they managed to get these you know,
five foot increments to cure in about seventy two hours.
So again, I mean another just the idea that they like,
nobody had really tried something like this on the scale.
So these people were kind of making it up and
going and doing the math as as they went a
(43:00):
long and they were right like time after time. That's
the most astounding part to me. Yeah, I mean that
the heat is a big problem for concrete because it's
going to expand in that heat, and then you know,
in the desert it can cool down quite a bit.
You know, the temperature variation between the heat of day
and at night can be really drastic, and so it's
really tough to control all that and they managed to
(43:21):
do it, which is remarkable. Um, they divide this whole
thing up into blocks, and there are two hundred blocks
total making up the Hoover Dam. Um. Depending they're they're
smaller at the downstream face and they are upstream, but
they range from about square feet to sixty square feet. Uh.
And all of those blocks together, all two hundred of them,
(43:44):
make up the Hoover Dam. Finally, on they poured that
last bucket of concrete, which I imagine was a pretty
darn good day. I'll bet it was too. And then
after that, after that last block of concrete cured, they
squeeze grout, which is um cement and water, like a
really kind of slushy mixture, into every crack and crevice
(44:07):
there was in between those blocks to form a solid sheet.
And then just for good measure, they pumped grout into
those cooling pipes. So and then they cap that off.
So inside the Hoover Dam there's enough concrete to make
a sixteen ft wide, eight inch deep road all the
(44:30):
way from San Francisco to New York. It is amazing. So, dude,
I think we should do this into two parts. If
Evil Kinevel got a two parter, I think the Hoover
Dam deserves a two parter. Two. We've been at it
for forty five minutes, so there's still a long long
way to go. So should we do that? Yes, let's
so since we're doing a two parter. Uh, well, I
(44:51):
guess that brings up listener mail, right, Chuck, I think
let's skip listener mail. Okay, Damn doesn't get too listener mails. Okay, fine,
was just it was getting a little ambitious. Well, in
the meantime, if you want to drop us a line,
you can go to stuff you Should Know dot com
and check out our social links. You can check me
out on the Josh Clark Way dot com and you
can send me Chuck, Jerry and everyone involved in Stuff
(45:13):
you Should Know an email to stuff podcast at i
heeart radio dot com. Stuff you Should Know is a
production of iHeart Radios. How stuff works for more podcasts
for my heart Radio because at the iHeart Radio app,
Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
Welcome to Stuff You Should Know, a production of My
Heart Radios How Stuff Works. Hey, and welcome to the podcast.
I'm Josh Clark, Who's Charles Chuck Bryant, And there's Jerry
Roland over there. And if you put all three of
us together you get a little something called Stuff you
(00:23):
Should Know. Oh, Man, Damn, Hoover Damn edition. Have you
ever been to Hoover Damn? I have been there twice show.
Yeah I went. Um, I went in Oh the great
(00:44):
Hoover Damn Tour of it was either or Man, it
may have been nine. Almost cussed right then? Yeah, I
heard that. I almost did that the other day to
getting to a movie crushy. Um. It may have been
eighty nine or ninety. It was when I went out
to visit my brother when he lived in l A.
(01:05):
And we met in Las Vegas, drove down to the
Hoover dam and then back to l A. The first
time you guys met, Yeah, it was great. Uh. And
then I went again in ninety six for sure, ninety
six and okay, I think both times I took the tour. Uh.
And it's have you ever been? It's really something else. Yeah,
(01:27):
for the first time you me and I went about
a year ago. Um, we drove from uh Scottsdale to
Vegas and stopped in Hoover Dam on the way and
it was great, as you do, it was very very cool. Well,
there's nothing, nothing, nothing nothing. Hoover Damn, Vegas is kind
of how it goes. Yeah, and you know, we'll get
(01:48):
to the water levels. But it's uh, it's startling from
when I was there what it looks like now. Yeah,
I can imagine like if you had gone any time
before about two thousand. From what I understand, it's like
a different, different place. But the damn still there and
it's still intact and doing really well. You got that
at least, right, it's just the ecological catastrophe that's kind
(02:11):
of looming that kind of is a downer. That's right.
And we should give a big shout out to Julia Layton,
who used to be one of the great great writers
for how Stuff Works dot com back when we were
uh still associated with that website. I think she might
still write for him occasionally. Really well, she's great and
(02:33):
now we are commissioning some articles from her, and boy,
she's good, Yes she is. So what's her nickname? Chuck
the lates Julia Layton. Late's no, because that sounds like
she's not tardy. Oh yeah, that's right. Um, let's just
call her Dr Layton. Okay, there you go. Although I
don't think she's a doctor, but she does have her
(02:55):
masters in writing, that's right, So way better than me.
She cranks out some good stuff, that's right. So thanks, Julia,
I'm glad you called that out, Chuck. Well done. So
let's go back, shall we to a time in the
the little the little area of the southwestern United States
where Arizona reaches out to hug Nevada, Nevada. Which way
(03:20):
are we supposed to say it? Well, we're supposed to
say Nevada, but we're not from there, so we'll say Nevada,
right like everybody else, right, Um. And where they almost meet,
there's a little gorge. There's a canyon. Well there's a
lot of canyons, but there's one in particular, and it's
called Boulder Canyon. And if you went to Boulder Canyon
(03:41):
today to find the Hoover Dam, you would be s
o l because while they're originally going to build the
Hoover Dam at Boulder Canyon, so much so that the
name of the project for the first decade or so
it was called the Boulder Boulder Dam just Bold Boulder once,
not two Boulders, the Boulder Dam project. Um, they actually
(04:01):
moved it a little further upstream to a much more
suitable site called Black Canyon. And if you go visit
the Hoover Dam today, that's where you're actually going. It's
Black Canyon where Nevada and Arizona almost meat, that's right.
And um, this idea was conceived, this concrete gravity arch
(04:22):
hydro electric dam, hydro electric almost almost high dough electric.
Excuse me. Uh, this was all conceived because well, for
three reasons plus a cherry on top. One is that
the Colorado River had a had a bad habit of
(04:44):
flooding and causing lots of devastation. Just a nasty boy,
so too to lasso that that beast. Uh. Number Two,
to create water in times of drought, as you know,
creating a big reservoir that would be like mead uh,
to create energy. I love things that kill all these birds,
you know, so many dead birds. Uh. And then finally
(05:08):
the little cherry on top. Those were the three big
reasons they did it. But the cherry on top. It
turns out has been like me tourism is huge. Yeah,
I think like Mead was the first nationally designated recreation area. Yeah.
It sounds almost Soviet, doesn't it. Like the government's like
this is where you recreate on this particular designated lake.
(05:30):
Travel to the fund zone. So um yeah, the first one.
I think there's like this. This is the nineteen twenties,
I think when the project is really starting to gain
steam and the guy who was this Secretary of Commerce
at the time, who Herbert Hoover, who would very soon
be the President of the United States, who would very
(05:51):
shortly after that be like the most hated man in America.
Hoover was like, this is a great idea. There's like
this whole spot of land down in the Lower United States,
and it just wants to be so much more than
it than it is. It wants to be cropland, it
wants to be cattle pasture. It wants to be a
big old city like l A or Vegas. They're just
(06:13):
waiting to pop, but they really are having trouble with
water and with flooding. Like it's it's weird. It's like
the Colorado River would be like not enough, sorry, and
then up too much, way more than you ever wanted.
And because of this kind of mercurial nature of it,
there was just not a lot that could be done
with the Southwest unless you figured out a way to
(06:34):
tame that that river. And you know, like you were saying,
that's what the Hoover dam was originally intended to do,
and that's definitely what it did. I mean, just to
kind of let the cat out of the bag early. Um,
it was successful as far as damn projects go. Yeah,
And just to clear something up when you just said
Herbert Hoover said big cities like l A and Vegas,
(06:57):
he had a crystal ball on Vegas because Vegas was
cowtown back then. Yeah, population five thousand at around ninety. Yeah,
Vegas didn't people didn't want to go there until gambling
started happening. They did have gambling. They had gambling, they
had prostitution, they had yes, they had drinking. I guess
(07:18):
casinos thanks to h what's his name, Buggsy. Yeah, Bugsy
was one of the first, wouldn't he. I think so
he wasn't the first, was he? I mean I saw
that movie and if I remember correctly, Warren Beatty built
that Flamingo casino and hotel, and that was kind of
the first major casino. If I'm not mistaken, that sounds
(07:40):
like a guy who deserves his own episode of stuff.
You should know who Bugsy or or Warren Beatty. But
Bugsy okay, Warren Beatty maybe gets the short stuff. So,
uh the cup man, what a cut burn. It's better
than just ignoring his existence and something's uh. So the
Colorado River, like we said, um, it's the seventh longest
(08:04):
in the US, about close to fift miles of total flow,
and I believe that it distributes water that the river
itself and then its tributaries to about million people. Of
the crops in the US and of the livestock drink
(08:24):
its water in the United States. It does now. So
before this, before the Hoover Dam project, when the Colorado
just did whatever the Colorado wanted to do. It's not
like the people of the Southwest had had not tried
to tame it before. They had extensive irrigation canals and
ditches and dikes and earthworks and everything they could think
(08:48):
of to keep the river going this way or that
way and to keep it from flooding, and none of
it worked. I mean it would work some like yes,
an irrigation canal would work and you could here get
your crops. But eventually the river was gonna flood and
because you had diverted the river towards your crop land,
when it flooded, it flooded that irrigation ditch, and it
flooded your crop land to which was a real problem
(09:10):
for you because it would when eventually it would recede um,
you might have a lot more dirt than you're used to,
probably pretty fertile dirt, but your crops would be gone.
Maybe some of your cows got carried away, you might
have lost your ten gallon hat. It's not a good
deal when your crop land gets flooded. And so this
was kind of what was going on when they were
trying to tame the Colorado. It was just way too
(09:32):
big of a project for you know, a handful of
even large scale farmers to take on, which was one
reason why the federal government stepped in because at the
time there was really no entity that could take on
a project like this, And even then there were a
lot of questions like I'm not even sure the U. S.
Government can handle this kind of thing. And the government said, oh, well, watch,
(09:55):
watch and learn suckers. Yeah. So it's when uh US
Bureau of Reclamation said, all right, I think we can
build a dam of all dams. Um, we're gonna make
it a gravity arch design. I think that can handle
the Colorado River. And we're gonna have tunnels and turbines
and towers, and we're gonna prevent flooding, and we're gonna
(10:19):
deliver water to people. And the best news is we're
going to create well, all that's great news, but more
great news is we're going to create energy for a
ton of people, such that this thing will even pay
for itself in fifty years time. And like you said,
a lot of people, I mean, this was and a
lot of people are like, I don't Even engineers were saying,
(10:41):
I don't know if this is possible, right, And so
not only were people incredulous that it was even possible,
there's some seven states that draw water from the Colorado River,
which is a pretty long river. It goes it starts
in the Rocky Mountains, that's where it's fed by snow
melt up there, and then it goes all the way
down to Mexico and so seven states lay claim on water.
(11:05):
They need water from the Colorado River to live, to
irriget their crops, to feed their livestock. It's the kind
of like the main artery for life in in the Southwest,
or one of them. And when they found out that
people in the seven States found out the US government
was was wanting to damn and control the river, they
got really worried that really this was just a project
(11:27):
to divert all that beautiful water over to California. Because
California had it going on by the late twenties, you know,
the early mid twenties already thanks to Los Angeles, thanks
to well, thanks to Los Angeles, UM. But it had
a lot of potential, and it was growing San Francisco
to it was it. It was growing in between those two,
those two cities. And so the people in like New
(11:50):
Mexico and Colorado and Arizona and Nevada were really worried
that this was really just the federal government stepping in
and saying, thanks a lot, we're gonna take this water
and send it off to California, and um. Herbert Hoover
actually intervened and said no, no no, no, how about this.
Before we even get this project underway, we will broker
a deal for how the water from the Colorado River
(12:12):
gets distributed. And I'm Herbert Hoover. I'm going to be
the most hated man in the world. So I'm going
to actually purposely inflate the the capacity that this reservoir
will hold so that no one feels like they're they're
going to get left out. And everybody ended up signing on.
So that was technically step negative one or maybe step
zero before the plan was even fully adopted by the government. Yeah,
(12:38):
and it was called the Colorado River Compact. And again
it was just to make I think the only ones
you left out were Utah and Wyoming and then the
other five. Um. And they said, all right, the way
you a portion, it looks good to us. California is like,
we all know that we're really going to get the
most water, right, and it was like, totally don't worry about.
(13:00):
Everyone's gonna hate me soon and many people will hate
California one day too. Um. And so Congress said, this
looks great, let's push forward. Uh, despite the fact, I
don't think we mentioned yet that the private sector. Of course,
I mean, if you think the private sector and the
government have been it's like a newish thing that they're
arguing over stuff like this. Think again, because since the
(13:22):
dawn of time in the United States, the government and
the private sector have squabbled, and so obviously private power
companies and and water companies and just everybody was like, geez,
I don't like the sounds of this, like the government's
gonna start getting into the electricity business. Um. But regardless,
they had no choice. Congress approved the Boulder Dam project,
(13:46):
like you said, that later moved to Black Canyon, and
for many, many years it was kind of bounced back
and forth between Boulder Dam and then Hoover Dam. Uh.
They officially called it Hoover Dam in nineteen thirty one,
but like you said, four times, Hoover people didn't like
him when he left office, so they went, let's call
(14:07):
it the Boulder Dam again. And then it took a
congressional resolution in nineteen seven to finally bring it back
and give Hoover his due right. The reason why people
hated Hoover, especially right after he left office, like he
was a super conservative president. He believed that the federal
government should intervene in business and in personal affairs as
(14:29):
little as possible. So in the grips the worst parts
of the Great Depression, the greatest economic recession that's ever
hit the world, he was literally vetoing bills that would
give federal assistance to Americans. So he was very much
hated and reviled by the average person and just about
everybody when he when he was soundly defeated by FDR,
(14:53):
I think in nineteen thirty two. That sounded so uneasy
in nineteen thirty ish to election. So obviously, if you're
gonna undertake a project in award contracts to two companies
to build this thing, there's probably not one company that
(15:14):
can tackle something like this that has all the different
UH skills necessary to build something like the Hoover Dam.
So UH six actually companies, six big big construction firms
got together and UH formed what was called, wait for it,
the six Companies right in nineteen thirty one, and they
(15:35):
served as the kind of UH mega construction firm that
undertook this huge, huge project. Yeah, they bid the project
out at like forty eight point eight million dollars um,
which is so funny to think about now, Like it's
a little money for something like this. Yeah, even when
you adjust for inflation, it's still a surprisingly low amount.
(15:57):
It comes out to about eight hundred million dollars. And
it's like the federal government today spends billion dollars like
it's nothing. This is like a huge deal that the
federal government government was spending the equivalent of today's eight
hundred million dollars. But one reason why they went with
the six companies consortium is because the Bureau of Reclamation
this is the department that oversaw the project. Um, they
(16:20):
had calculated the costs themselves, and the six companies bid
was only about twenty four thousand dollars more than the
six company or than the Bureau of Reclamation had estimated
the project would cost about twenty four grand over right,
So they were like, all right, if you want to
build this whole project for dollars have added UM. And
(16:44):
I mean obviously they were six legitimate major construction companies
and then all of them combined together form one super
construction company. UM. So they seem to be pretty comfortable
with this consortium. And from everything I can tell, unless
you're a workers rights kind of person, um, this this company.
Their faith in this consortium was well placed because they
(17:05):
did a pretty good job, saving maybe one major mistake, um,
which we'll get too later. It was it's a pretty
good government construction project if you ask me, public private,
all right, UM, I feel like we should take a
break now and come back and talk about, uh, infrastructure
(17:26):
right for this. All right, So we're back and uh
it will take a couple of years. Obviously, you're not
going to dive into a project like this right away
(17:46):
because you can't back then because of where it was located.
And if you think about it, um, like part of
the problem with this project from the beginning was its
location and how isolated the Southwest was from other like
major parts of the U S at the time. And
so they were like, wait a minute, we're not close
(18:07):
to anything Like Vegas only is the closest place and
it has five thousand people. That doesn't really help us much.
It's like, you know, miles away. So here's what we're
gonna have to do. Um, we're gonna have to build
a town that's really close by for all of our
employees and our workers to live. And so they did
(18:27):
just that. I think this was about six miles away.
They literally constructed a city called Boulder, city, UM west
of the damn site. It had seven fifty eight cottages
if you were married and worked or had a family
or whatever. It had nine dormitories for single men. I
(18:48):
imagine that was a wild scene. Uh. They had a hospital,
they had a department store, they had laundry, they had
a school, they had a post office, they had uh
liquor stills and and that's real illegal by the way.
Sure of course this depression or prohibition, UM, but they
needed their booze, like, let's be honest. Uh. And this
(19:10):
this city actually remained under government control until nineteen fifty nine,
when uh it got its own incorporation, which is kind
of crazy. Yeah, the the the Hoover Damn was dedicated,
like the project was done basically UM by nineteen thirty eight, Um,
nineteen thirty nine. I think they're still working on outbuildings
(19:31):
and stuff for a little while. But for twenty years
after a lot of the people who had UM built
the damn were like, I really like this Bowlder City town.
I'm gonna stay here. And one of the reasons why
you would stay there is because like the government ran
the town. There were no elected officials. There was an
appointed Bureau of Reclamation, um department, uh like administrator that
(19:55):
was like the de facto mayor of the town. And
like if there was something wrong with your house, You're
of Reclamation workers would come fix it, like your sink
or paint your house or whatever. You didn't have to
do anything because the government this is like federal land.
And finally in nineteen what'd you say, the government was like,
all right, freeloaders, you can paint your own houses from
(20:17):
now on. This is your place. And they incorporated it
into a city in nineteen sixty, I guess, yeah, And
it's uh still one of two cities in Nevada that
say no gambling here, which is pretty unique. You know.
At the at the height of this project to Chuck
Bowlder City, which hadn't existed just a couple of years before.
Like it wasn't like they took over an existing city
and built it up. There was nothing there before and
(20:39):
they built a city from scratch. Um it was. It
had the biggest population in Nevada at the time. Yeah,
more than Vegas. Yeah, by by a few hundred people,
I believe. All right, so they built I mean this
is keep in mind again, this before they can even
get started on this dam. They say, we gotta build
a city. We gotta build um seven miles of highway,
(21:01):
we gotta build twenty three miles of railway, we got
to build um bring in like two miles of power lines,
and we have to bring in cableways spanning this canyon.
And it's just all this massive amounts of infrastructure to
tackle this project where they were gonna be paying dudes
(21:21):
fifty cents to a dollar an hour, which is between
eight bucks and twenty bucks an hour in today dollars. Right,
what's ironic is the harder and the more dangerous your
job typically the less you were paid, kind of like
today kind of. Yeah, there was there is a group
(21:42):
called the muckers, and they were the ones who had
to like get the stone in the sludge and all
that stuff out of the canyon bottom. And um, they
got paid the least even though they were the most
um exposed to like falling rocks and falling items, and
apparently like falling stuff was a real danger on this project. Yeah,
(22:03):
well we'll get to that later, but a lot of
noggins suffered. Um, So then the other thing that they
had to do, they're like all right, we got the
city built, we got all these highways, We've got all
this stuff, We've got all these people. We got a
good plan. They're like, we need to do something with
this river because you can't. You can't just start stacking
rocks and divert the Colorado River. So they literally had
(22:27):
to come up with a plan to reroute the Colorado
River while they built this thing. I hadn't thought about that.
I'm sure you knew about it two times over from
your double visits and the tour. Now, did you just
drive across it? No, we walked around. We didn't take
one of these sexual like tours, tours like it was
seventeen bucks, right, Like, I'm sure I know as much
(22:51):
as this guy. Um, but no, No, I mean like
we took out the whole thing and we were there
for a couple of hours or anything. But it was
self guided to her, How about that got you? No,
that's great, but it had never occurred to me. And
I didn't learn on this self guided tour that we
just made up ourselves. Um, that that that you would
have to divert the river, that the river was still
going through um Black Canyon at the time. Um, and
(23:14):
you just couldn't build a damn there while the river
was trying to get through there. There's a lot of
stuff you could do so to to divert the river. Um,
they did some really ingenious stuff. And if you step
back and look at it from like the eyes of
a like like a child, it's really just too three
four steps and building this damn if you really look
(23:36):
at a super high level or super I guess childlike again,
um in all of them make total sense. But just
the audacity of saying, yeah, we can do that, Yeah,
add that extra step on before we get started. It's
it really kind of goes to the heart of like,
just what an amazing civil engineering project this was. So
(23:56):
like with any damn, if you want to divert that water,
you're gonna have to go up straight a certain amount,
and they have very smart engineers that figure out exactly
where to do this. And in this case they built
uh Coffer dams, which is a very common thing to
do when you want to build a damn downstream. It's
basically sort of like a big hole in the river
that uh the water would just flow into these. So
(24:20):
the water instead of going downstream, dumps into these Coffer Dams,
and then it funnels that water into these four tunnels,
two on each side of the canyon under the canyon,
instead of between them, diverting everything around to then rejoin
uh the other you know, those those tunnels rejoin each
other as the Colorado River once again downstream, right. And
(24:44):
I think the Coffer Dam is actually kind of like
a like an earthworks, like a wall inside the water.
Yeah you will, you pump the water out, you kind
of make it a hole. But yeah, so so this
these tunnels that they diverted this too, Chuck, where it
combined four miles four miles of tunnel, so each each
(25:05):
tunnel was about a mile because there are four of
them through the canyon rock which was granite. And they
dug out these tunnels as and built the Coffer Dam
just to start the whole thing, not as part of
the larger project, but this is like to to just
to get started. That was the first thing they had
to do. Yeah, there were fifty ft in diameter, like
(25:26):
these were not small tunnels. They had to be lined
with three feet of concrete to hold up. And I
think the water was was racing through those at a
rate of two hundred thousand cubic feet per second. So
it's amazing. That's a hundred and thirty six um Olympic
sized pools per minute passing through there. Yeah, I mean
(25:49):
this would be remarkable today, dude. Yeah, you know for sure.
And as we'll see those those things are still in operation,
although they use them differently now. Um, but yeah, that
that's that's just a ton of water. And and they said, yep, success,
it worked. We diverted um this water down further downstream
because you know, the tunnels ended below the damn project
(26:10):
site and then all of a sudden, the Colorado River
had been diverted around the dam and now they could
get started, right, And so they're like, all right, we
feel like we could just quit now because what we
did was pretty awesome. But we don't have a damn yet.
So in this huge canyon, we need, uh, if we're
gonna build a dam, we need to make these walls
(26:31):
smooth because they were you know, it was a canyon.
It was just jagged rock and you can't just fill
in a bunch of concrete against this jagged rock. They
have these abutments that are gonna secure this huge concrete
slab to the canyon walls. So they had to smooth
these things out, and that was done by I mean,
I want to say the most dangerous job, but it's
(26:53):
kind of hard to pick. But the high scale ers
are definitely up there as far as danger goes. If
you go to the Hoover Dam site today, there's a
statue of a high scaler. It's a guy like on
a rope with like a toolbag hanging from me. He's
like scaling down the side of the uh, the canyon wall.
And that's exactly what they did. Because if you're trying
(27:15):
to clear the canyon walls and you're talking, you know,
your seven hundred feet up between the bottom of the
canyon and the canyon rim, You've got a lot of
rock that you're trying to get out of there. Um,
it's not easy. You can't just you know, hit it
with a pole and priyate loose. You get to blast
it loose, actually sure, but to no avail. They spent
(27:38):
a good year and a half trying that and nothing happened. Um,
but the uh I'm totally joking about that, by the way, Um, Okay,
to to blast it the chuck, you have to drill
a hole and then put the dynamite in and then
blast it. But if you're trying to drill a wholesomewhere,
you know, halfway between the canyon ridge and the canyon bottom,
(27:58):
you have to have a guy on a rope who
is willing to swing down there, have a jackhammer four
pound jackhammer lowered to him, and then it drill a
hole with a jackhammer suspended from the edge of the
canyon um into the into the mid air um and
then pack it full of dynamite. Light it, get out
(28:18):
of the way, let the blast happen, and then come
back and then use a pole to private rocks loose.
That's what these guys had to do. And if you
want to know how Jackhammers work, everybody, let me tell you.
We have maybe our best episode ever in eleven years.
Jack It was the worst one we've ever done. Like
there's no question, Like the sun ha ha, you know
(28:40):
it was terrible. Jackhammers was actually bad. At least the
son's an interesting thing, right A right, good point. Um,
All right, so they're they're blasting these things out. These dudes, uh,
believe it or not, did not even have hard hats
at the time. They were not supplied with hard hats. No.
That's one big criticis some of the six six Companies
(29:01):
consortium that they did not care about workers, right. So
there was a strike that happened in and the guy
running the show for the six companies name was Frank Crow.
They called him hurry up Crow. Um, he fired everybody.
He just fired everybody and brought in new workers. They
didn't get hard hats until they basically said, we're not
gonna work anymore unless you give us hard hats. They
(29:22):
had to make their own hard hats by taking soft hats,
which I guess it's just a hat, and then putting
it in like coal tar and letting it like molten
coal tar, and then letting it cool, and all of
a sudden you had like a homemade hard hat. And
then finally the company is just like, all right, you're
making us look bad. We'll we'll get some actual ones.
But it took like a little while before they had
(29:43):
any any actual hard hats on site. Yeah, those homemade
ones are called hard boiled hats, and they really actually
worked that. Um. I know that thing you sent said
that some of the rocks falling on these hard boiled hats.
Their their head would be fine, but it would be
such force that would actually break their jaw. So these
they worked, these hard bowl hats actually worked, um, but
(30:06):
I imagine they wanted the real thing. You'd be like
if I don't think though, And they would do tricks
and stuff like in their downtime they would you know,
a lot of these people were I mean not a lot,
but some of them were like circus workers, right, and
people like former military that could do this kind of thing.
And apparently between working they would fly around and do little,
(30:30):
uh high wire tricks and stuff basically, and Native Americans too,
And you always hear about when the skyscrapers were built,
they'd be like, yeah, we just hired a bunch of
Native Americans and they'll run all over steel beams as
much as you please without any fear. And I've always
wondered why that's the case, and is it is it?
It's got to just be some sweeping generalization that Native
(30:50):
Americans aren't afraid of heights, obviously, but like, are there
specific tribes that were exposed to things like cliff walls
for generations and generations and that they became used to
these dizzy heights so that it wasn't a big deal.
And those are the same tribes that you know made
their way out to New York to build the skyscrapers too.
We gotta get to the bottom of that one. Or
(31:11):
maybe they were just tough and not scared of anything.
They just didn't let on. But there we have to.
We have to tell this once, the story of Burrel
Our Rutledge, though, man like like, I almost faint just
just reading about it. I'm sure because you don't love heights. No,
I don't love heights. So let's just go over this
one more time. If you were in the canyon rim
(31:32):
of the the Boulder Damn Hoover Dam project at the time,
you were more than seven feet above the bottom of
the canyon, which for all intents and purposes, is straight down.
That's like a sixty story building. Basically, it's a really
really big height and you can sense it, man, when
you're there, and Hoover Dam, if you haven't been, go
(31:54):
it's totally worth the trip for sure, um, especially if
you're in Las Vegas. Um. But there was a guy
named Burl Rutledge who was one of the engineers for
the Bureau of Reclamation, and I guess he lost his
footing or something and he fell off off the canyon
rim on his way down to the canyon bottom a
(32:15):
sixty story building below him, that's right. And then thankfully,
um he either had a a former circus worker or
somebody who was just very brave named Oliver Cowen about
below apparently heard this, I guess it calls a bit
of a commotion and swung himself out. He's hanging in
(32:35):
a it's called abortion seat that's like sort of like
a little sling seat. He rushes over as fast as
he can go, swinging out and grabs this guy's leg
as he's sliding down the canyon wall. And then another
high scaler named Arnold Parks then swings over, you know,
helps him pin his body to the wall, and they
held him there until they could drop a line and
(32:57):
pull him up. If I were Rutledge, I would have
been like, like, just let me go, let me go.
I can't stand this. I'm so scared. They're like, Josh,
we've really got you. You know. You're like it's all over.
I'm never going to be the same again. Well, that's
probably true. You would just moved to the to the
lowest place in the continuous contiguous United States. I can't
(33:21):
imagine what the rest of Burl Rutledge's day was after that,
but it was good. I bet he drank a lot.
I hope it was a good day. But yeah, So
that happened like that, like the thing that everyone's imagination
thinks of when you think of a bunch of people
doing construction work on a canyon. Ledge, that happened, and
it actually panned out pretty well for Burl Rutledge at least.
(33:43):
All right, man, I think it's time for a message break, agreed,
all right? So do are dying? Though? Um? I saw
anywhere between like ninety three to ninety six to a
(34:05):
hundred people died total in the whole project, which, all
things being equal, for what they were doing, isn't that
high of a number. Um A hundred lives is a
lot though to be lost on a specific engineering project. Yeah,
I saw as high as a hundred and twelve. And
the six companies, again, they weren't exactly known for having
(34:25):
like the loosest pockets. If you file the some sort
of health claim against them for you know, an injury
or an illness sustained working on the job, there was Um.
I think like thirty six forty two people associated with
the project died of pneumonia. But I think the Las
Vegas Star did an investigation either years later at the
(34:47):
time and said there were basically no deaths back at
Boulder City of pneumonia. If there was pneumonia, it would
have been going around Boulder City. And we think that
really pneumonia is just a code word from the six
companies or carbon monoxide poison because the six companies wanted
to cover it up so they didn't didn't have to
pay out any you know, money to the family because
(35:09):
they accidentally killed the dad with carbon monoxide poisoning because
he was working all day alongside like a diesel engine
in one of these you know, mile long tunnels. Yeah,
so that was the kind of stuff that they endured. Um.
Heat stroke killed a lot of people too. Oh yeah,
in the summer of nine three alone, apparently about three
(35:29):
people per week. We're dying a pete stroke because dude
in in the sun in these tunnels in particular, apparently
would get up to a hundred and forty degrees fahrenheit,
which is some ungodly amount and celsius too, and then
in the shade. On the worst days, it would get
to like a hundred and twenty degrees in the shade.
(35:50):
It's a dry heat though. Sure it's not the heat,
it's the humidity unless it's a hundred and twenty and
then it doesn't matter. Yeah, And one of the common
um urban legends is that there are dead bodies um
in the concrete of Hoover Damn. That is not true,
and I love how Julia put it. Common decency aside.
(36:10):
She says it would have compromised the structural integrity. So
they they had to fish these bodies out, because if
you were a body in concrete, you're gonna decompose eventually,
and that's gonna leave bubbles and introduce gas into the concrete,
and that's going to weaken the structure. So they had
to fish all these bodies out and even still well
we'll talk about the concrete next, but just just to
(36:31):
kind of lay the foundation for this point, feel forgive
the punt you when they when they poured a bucket's
worth of concrete to build the damn face there the
damn itself, I guess um the dam was so enormous
that the whole bucket only raised the level of concrete
by like two to six inches, depending on the block
(36:52):
they were pouring. So if you fell into the concrete,
you were you fell into two inches of concrete basically,
So you were you were you were going to get
lost in the concrete or anything like that. And then
on top of that, yet they even if they did
not care about whether you spent eternity entombed, they would
be like, well, you're not gonna You're not gonna screw
with the integrity of our damn So, yes, there's no
(37:15):
dead bodies in there, no dead bodies. So so let's
talk about the concrete, shall we, real quick? Yeah? Um,
So at this point, the walls are clean and smooth.
They've got these abutments in place, which, by the way,
if I may, okay, So I looked all over for
the abutments, and all I ever saw was it's the
(37:35):
it's the walls of the canyon, the rock walls of
the canyon, or the abutments from what I can gather. Um,
you know how when you when you grab somebody nicely
and in jokingly by the shoulders right and are holding
them securely like this, right, so you've got your thumbs
on the front of their arms, and you've got their
fingers on the back of their arms like that, right,
(37:58):
your fingers and thumbs are acting as abutments. And so
the abutments that are holding rather than this poor sap
who again you're just joking around with um, rather than
than that person, these abutments are the canyon walls holding
the damn itself in places. Okay, I mean I had,
(38:19):
but like I couldn't tell if they were like parts
of that stuck out of the damn or parts that
stuck out of the canyon walls. And I don't know.
Maybe it was one of those things where everybody else
knows what abutments is, and that's why no one went
to the trouble of explaining it. But I couldn't find
it like spelled out or a good picture saying here's
(38:40):
the abutments. So I just assumed that no one else
knew and I was the only one digging into it.
But now I feel like my eyes have been open. Well,
I have the three fake teeth and implants, so I
know what abutments are. They go, that was it's different
in your teeth but not really the same word, same function, right,
So these abutments are in place, and they were like,
(39:02):
all right, we gotta start pouring some concrete. The design itself, Um,
a lot of damns use this design. It's called a
gravity arch, and it's basically just using the natural pressure
of of the land to uh kind of force everything
tight into that uh tightened down that concrete between those
(39:23):
two canyons. Yeah, it's really ingenious, dude. It's it's just
like an arched bridge where gravity presses down on the arch,
which makes the arch press in to say, like the
walls of the canyon that the bridge is crossing, and
the bridge the walls of the canyon pushed back, which
only strengthens the bridge. Same exact thing. It's like if
you took a bridge at arch bridge and put it
(39:46):
on its side. That's what the Hoover dam is. So
when the water presses into that curve of the arch,
it tries to straighten the dam, which presses the damn
into the sides of the canyon walls, which press back
strengthens the damn. It's ingenious, ingenious, I tell you, yeah,
And so uh they didn't even need that. That's kind
(40:08):
of the funny part about all of this there's so
much concrete that it could have been a flat slab,
which a lot of damns are, but um, apparently engineers
thought that would freak people out to have a flat
slab damn that big, and so they said, let's just
curve it anyway, because everyone understands basic physics, right, all right,
(40:29):
and it looks cool and it does look very cool. Um, alright,
so we're we're actually finally to the concrete. Um. There
are three point two five million cubic yards of concrete
that make up the Hoover dam, uh and then another
one point one one million cubic yards and um, it's
(40:50):
not just the damn face. There's a lot of you know,
the houses, a power plant and all these outlying structures,
and five million barrels of cement. Five million barrels went
into mixing all this concrete, which they mixed on site, uh,
sen in rail cars hoisted down on these cableways that
they had built. And every seventy eight seconds, these workers
(41:14):
would get a new bucket of concrete to poor right
right for um until about five ft of the dam
had been poured, and then after that they had to
stop for seventy two hours to let it cure, because
curing is a huge part when you're working with concrete.
If it doesn't cure right, then the stuff inside is
going to take longer to cure than the stuff outside.
(41:36):
Um which isn't that big of a deal if you're
pouring like you know, a driveway in a house or
something like that. But when you're pouring a dam that
has to have like really exact dimensions, you have to
keep the outside and the inside curing at about the
same rate. So they came up with this really ingenious
um way to cure this concrete really fast. And they
(41:57):
ran pipes, steel pipes all through all the concrete that
they poured, So there's steel pipes running all over the
Hoover dam inside of it, and they cooled water on
site to like like just above freezing, and they pumped
it through these pipes so that when they were pouring concrete,
the concrete was being cooled internally and they were spraying
(42:17):
it with water on the outside too, So it was
curing at about the same rate inside as it was outside,
and it was curing fast in about seventy two hours,
where if they had poured a slab that if they
poured the Hoover Dam in one big slab had just
left it, first of all, it would have been all
messed up all kinds of ways. But it also would
have taken about a hundred and twenty five years to
(42:39):
cure fully on its own. It'd still be curing now.
But they get they managed to get these you know,
five foot increments to cure in about seventy two hours.
So again, I mean another just the idea that they like,
nobody had really tried something like this on the scale.
So these people were kind of making it up and
going and doing the math as as they went a
(43:00):
long and they were right like time after time. That's
the most astounding part to me. Yeah, I mean that
the heat is a big problem for concrete because it's
going to expand in that heat, and then you know,
in the desert it can cool down quite a bit.
You know, the temperature variation between the heat of day
and at night can be really drastic, and so it's
really tough to control all that and they managed to
(43:21):
do it, which is remarkable. Um, they divide this whole
thing up into blocks, and there are two hundred blocks
total making up the Hoover Dam. Um. Depending they're they're
smaller at the downstream face and they are upstream, but
they range from about square feet to sixty square feet. Uh.
And all of those blocks together, all two hundred of them,
(43:44):
make up the Hoover Dam. Finally, on they poured that
last bucket of concrete, which I imagine was a pretty
darn good day. I'll bet it was too. And then
after that, after that last block of concrete cured, they
squeeze grout, which is um cement and water, like a
really kind of slushy mixture, into every crack and crevice
(44:07):
there was in between those blocks to form a solid sheet.
And then just for good measure, they pumped grout into
those cooling pipes. So and then they cap that off.
So inside the Hoover Dam there's enough concrete to make
a sixteen ft wide, eight inch deep road all the
(44:30):
way from San Francisco to New York. It is amazing. So, dude,
I think we should do this into two parts. If
Evil Kinevel got a two parter, I think the Hoover
Dam deserves a two parter. Two. We've been at it
for forty five minutes, so there's still a long long
way to go. So should we do that? Yes, let's
so since we're doing a two parter. Uh, well, I
(44:51):
guess that brings up listener mail, right, Chuck, I think
let's skip listener mail. Okay, Damn doesn't get too listener mails. Okay, fine,
was just it was getting a little ambitious. Well, in
the meantime, if you want to drop us a line,
you can go to stuff you Should Know dot com
and check out our social links. You can check me
out on the Josh Clark Way dot com and you
can send me Chuck, Jerry and everyone involved in Stuff
(45:13):
you Should Know an email to stuff podcast at i
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