Driving Across the Hoover Dam in 4k Video

Filmed on Wednesday, February 14 2024, I drive across the Hoover Dam to see what's going on.
In 1902, the Edison Electric Company of Los Angeles surveyed the Lower Colorado River in the hope of building a 40-foot rock dam which could generate 10,000 horsepower (7,500 kW). However, at the time, the limit of transmission of electric power was 80 miles, and there were few customers within that limit.
In the following years, the Bureau of Reclamation, known as the Reclamation Service at the time, also considered the Lower Colorado as the site for a dam. Service chief Arthur Powell Davis proposed using dynamite to collapse the walls of Boulder Canyon, 20 miles north of the eventual dam site, into the river.
In 1922, the Reclamation Service presented a report calling for the development of a dam on the Colorado River for flood control and electric power generation. The Service investigated Black Canyon and found it ideal; a railway could be laid from the railhead in Las Vegas to the top of the dam site.
Legislation to authorize the dam was introduced repeatedly by two California Republicans, but representatives from other parts of the country considered the project as hugely expensive and one that would mostly benefit California. The 1927 Mississippi flood made Midwestern and Southern politicans more sympathetic toward the dam project.
Congress authorized a board of engineers to review plans for the proposed dam. The Colorado River Board found the project feasible, but warned that should the dam fail, every downstream Colorado River community would be destroyed, and that the river might change course and empty into the Salton Sea.
On December 21, 1928, President Coolidge signed the bill authorizing the dam. Officials eventually decided on a massive concrete arch-gravity dam, the design of which was overseen by the Bureau's chief design engineer John L. Savage. The monolithic dam would be thick at the bottom and thin near the top and would present a convex face towards the water above the dam. The curving arch of the dam would transmit the water's force into the abutments - in this case, the rock walls of the canyon.
The city of Las Vegas had lobbied hard to be the headquarters for the dam construction, closing its many speakeasies when the decision maker, Secretary of the Interior Ray Wilbur, came to town. Instead, Wilbur announced in early 1930 that a model city was to be built in the desert near the dam site. This town became known as Boulder City, Nevada.
Soon after the dam was authorized, increasing numbers of unemployed people converged on southern Nevada. Las Vegas, then a small city of some 5,000, saw between 10,000 and 20,000 unemployed descend on it. A government camp was established for surveyors and other personnel near the dam site; this soon became surrounded by a squatters' camp. Known as McKeeversville, the camp was home to men hoping for work on the project, together with their families.
When construction began, Six Companies hired large numbers of workers, with more than 3,000 on the payroll by 1932 and with employment peaking at 5,251 in July 1934.
Before the dam could be built, the Colorado River needed to be diverted away from the construction site. To accomplish this, four diversion tunnels were driven through the canyon walls, two on the Nevada side and two on the Arizona side. These tunnels were 56 ft in diameter.
The first concrete was poured into the dam on June 6, 1933, 18 months ahead of schedule.
The concrete was delivered in huge steel buckets 7 feet high and almost 7 feet in diameter. These buckets, which weighed 20 short tons when full, were delivered to the site in special railcars. The buckets were then suspended from aerial cableways which were used to deliver the bucket to a specific column.
A total of 3,250,000 cubic yards of concrete was used in the dam before concrete pouring ceased on May 29, 1935.
There were 112 deaths reported as associated with the construction of the dam. The first was Bureau of Reclamation employee Harold Connelly who died on May 15, 1921, after falling from a barge while surveying the Colorado River for an ideal spot for the dam. The official list's final death occurred on December 20, 1935, when Patrick Tierney fell from one of the two Arizona-side intake towers.
There are two lanes for automobile traffic across the top of the dam, which formerly served as the Colorado River crossing for U.S. Route 93.
The four-lane Hoover Dam Bypass opened on October 19, 2010. It includes a composite steel and concrete arch bridge, the Mike O'Callaghan-Pat Tillman Memorial Bridge. With the opening of the bypass, through traffic is no longer allowed across Hoover Dam; dam visitors are allowed to use the existing roadway to approach from the Nevada side and cross to parking lots and other facilities on the Arizona side.
#drivingtour #hooverdam #nevada

[@martyaz]

Haven't been there in decades, thanks. Took the tour. Admittedly it's nice to have the bypass when driving to Vegas.

[@exploreusacities]

The bypass bridge is a pretty magnificent structure as well