Building of Hoover Dam Begins
On this day in 1930, construction of the
Hoover Dam begins. Over the next five years, a total of 21,000 men would work
ceaselessly to produce what would be the largest dam of its time, as well as
one of the largest manmade structures in the world.
Although the dam would take only five years to
build, its construction was nearly 30 years in the making. Arthur Powell Davis,
an engineer from the Bureau of Reclamation, originally had his vision for the
Hoover Dam back in 1902, and his engineering report on the topic became the
guiding document when plans were finally made to begin the dam in 1922.
Herbert Hoover, the 31st president of the
United States and a committed conservationist, played a crucial role in making
Davis’ vision a reality. As secretary of commerce in 1921, Hoover devoted
himself to the erection of a high dam in Boulder Canyon, Colorado. The dam
would provide essential flood control, which would prevent damage to downstream
farming communities that suffered each year when snow from the Rocky Mountains
melted and joined the Colorado River. Further, the dam would allow the
expansion of irrigated farming in the desert, and would provide a dependable
supply of water for Los Angeles and other southern California communities.
Even with Hoover’s exuberant backing and a
regional consensus around the need to build the dam, Congressional approval and
individual state cooperation were slow in coming. For many years, water rights
had been a source of contention among the western states that had claims on the
Colorado River. To address this issue, Hoover negotiated the Colorado River
Compact, which broke the river basin into two regions with the water divided
between them. Hoover then had to introduce and re-introduce the bill to build
the dam several times over the next few years before the House and Senate
finally approved the bill in 1928.
In 1929, Hoover, now president, signed the
Colorado River Compact into law, claiming it was “the most extensive action
ever taken by a group of states under the provisions of the Constitution
permitting compacts between states.”
Once preparations were made, the Hoover Dam’s
construction sprinted forward: The contractors finished their work two years
ahead of schedule and millions of dollars under budget. Today, the Hoover Dam
is the second highest dam in the country and the 18th highest in the world. It
generates enough energy each year to serve over a million people, and stands,
in Hoover Dam artist Oskar Hansen’s words, as “a monument to collective genius
exerting itself in community efforts around a common need or ideal.”
