Hoover Dam

9 Key excerpts on "Hoover Dam"

• 

  eBook - PDF

  Principles of Water Resources

  History, Development, Management, and Policy

  • Thomas V. Cech(Author)
  • 2018(Publication Date)
  • Wiley

    (Publisher)

  Bureau of Reclamation, Pacific Northwest Regional Office FIG. 7.8 The dramatic concrete arch design of Hoover Dam securely holds the impounded waters of Lake Mead. Power generators are located out of view at the base of the dam. Notice the two water intake towers just above the crest of the dam near the abutments. 210 CHAPTER 7. DAMS A CLOSER LOOK A highlight for many visitors to Hoover Dam is the artwork located throughout the project. Norwegian-born sculptor Oskar J.W. Hansen did much of the work, including a terrazzo plaza inlaid with a celestial map, sculptures, wall plaques, and basrelief (three-dimensional) work in concrete on elevator towers that represent water uses provided by the dam. Other artists and architects contributed to the terrazzo floors throughout the dam and power plant, which are embedded with illustrations that honor Native American tribes of the region, as well as decorative doors and railings. The most prominent sculpture is a bronze piece called “The Winged Figures of the Republic,” located near the Visitors Center. It bears a plaque commemorating the 96 men who died during construction of Hoover Dam. It reads: They died to make the desert bloom. The United States of America will continue to remember that many who toiled here found their final rest while engaged in the building of this dam. The United States of America will continue to remember the services of all who labored to clothe with substance the plans of those who first visioned the building of this dam. The Hoover Dam was built during a brutal period of history. The stock market crash of 1929, coupled with the devastating drought across the Midwest in the 1930s, crushed the economic viability of millions of families. For many, dam construction projects provided relief from these severe conditions. The promise of a paycheck led men to willingly dangle their lives hundreds of feet in the air, along the walls of a desert canyon, to build a government dam project.

  Sign up to read

  Learn more about book
• 

  eBook - ePub

  The Making of Modern Nevada

  • Hal Rothman(Author)
  • 2010(Publication Date)
  • University of Nevada Press

    (Publisher)

  Hoover Dam was a testimony to the power of modernity, an architectural achievement that captured the national imagination. Nothing like it had been built before and the Depression decade made it a valuable social project as well. In this sense, Hoover Dam linked nineteenth-century construction, which used human and animal sweat as its primary source of energy, with the construction of the twentieth century, far more reliant on computers and other technologies to lighten the load of workers. Americans at the time recognized Hoover Dam as a monumental and even transformative achievement. The southwestern writer Frank Waters, giddy at its prospects, labeled it “the Ninth Symphony of our day, a visual symphony written in steel and concrete.” Others heaped accolades equally as grand upon it, some labeling it the eighth wonder of the world.

  The economic and social energy the dam created was tremendous. Not only did it resuscitate Las Vegas and breathe new life into Nevada, it also transformed the Bureau of Reclamation from a marginal federal agency into one of the most powerful. The success of the dam paved the way for the bureau to become a preeminent federal agency and a powerful engine of development until the 1970s, when nascent environmentalism halted big dam construction. After Boulder Dam, the Bureau of Reclamation engaged in a forty-year orgy of dam building until it controlled the distribution of most of the water west of the Mississippi River and created legions of dependent local communities throughout the West. As it revived Nevada, it also gave it a new master, one that carried other dependents in tow.

  Hoover Dam was the first of the great dams. Its descendants can be seen across the West and around the world: in Aswan, Egypt, on the Nile River, and recently at Three Gorges on the Yangtze River in China. These later dams, technological marvels in their own right, owe their genesis to Hoover Dam. The technologies applied in the Nevada desert laid the basis for development of large dams throughout the world and gave humanity the ability to harness rivers for its own purposes. It also contributed to the arrogance of people who believed that they could find technological solutions to all kinds of problems. Even after the completion of the dam, Nevada was not yet through with such technological dreamers.

  Sign up to read

  Learn more about book
• 

  No longer available |Learn more

  All About Wonders of the Industrial World

  • (Author)
  • 2014(Publication Date)
  • University Publications

    (Publisher)

  ________________________ WORLD TECHNOLOGIES ________________________ Chapter- 6 Hoover Dam Hoover Dam Hoover Dam by Ansel Adams, 1942 Official name Hoover Dam Locale Clark County, Nevada / Mohave County, Arizona, USA Status In use Construction began 1931 Opening date 1936 Construction cost $49 million Owner(s) United States Government Dam and spillways Type of dam Concrete gravity-arch Height 726.4 ft (221.4 m) ________________________ WORLD TECHNOLOGIES ________________________ Length 1,244 ft (379 m) Crest width 45 ft (14 m) Base width 660 ft (200 m) Volume 3,250,000 cu yd (2,480,000 m 3 ) Impounds Colorado River Type of spillway 2 x controlled drum-gate Spillway capacity 400,000 cu ft/s (11,000 m 3 /s) Reservoir Creates Lake Mead Capacity 35.2 km 3 (28,500,000 acre·ft) Catchment area 167,800 sq mi (435,000 km 2 ) Surface area 247 sq mi (640 km 2 ) Max. water depth 590 ft (180 m) Power station Operator(s) U.S. Bureau of Reclamation Hydraulic head 590 ft (180 m) (Max) Turbines 17 main, Francis-type Installed capacity 2080 MW Annual generation 4.2 billion KWh Hoover Dam , once known as Boulder Dam , is a concrete arch-gravity dam in the Black Canyon of the Colorado River, on the border between the US states of Arizona and Nevada. It was constructed between 1931 and 1936 during the Great Depression, and was dedicated on September 30, 1935, by President Franklin Roosevelt. Its construction was the result of a massive effort involving thousands of workers, and cost over one hundred lives. ________________________ WORLD TECHNOLOGIES ________________________ Since about 1900, the Black Canyon and nearby Boulder Canyon had been investigated for their potential to support a dam that would control floods, provide irrigation water and produce hydroelectric power. In 1928, Congress authorized the project. The winning bid to build the dam was submitted by a consortium called Six Companies, Inc., which began construction on the dam in early 1931.

  Sign up to read

  Learn more about book
• 

  Available until 23 Dec |Learn more

  America's Greatest Projects

  From the Panama Canal to the Alaskan Pipeline

  • Dom Perrotta(Author)
  • 2020(Publication Date)
  • Christian Faith Publishing, Inc.

    (Publisher)

  The Hoover Dam

  The Hoover Dam proved to be another engineering marvel of the early twentieth century. The continuing life-threatening flooding of the Imperial Valley in Southern California from the Colorado River led to the idea of the need for a dam on the Colorado River to provide flood control. The construction of the dam was a life-threatening event in many ways, but the result created a path for development of the Southwestern United States, and the Hoover Dam became the largest hydroelectric plant in the world.

  Project Outline A. Approval and Administration

  1. Early political issues
  2. Arthur Powell Davis
  3. Congressional progress

  B. Planning and design

  1. Primary specifications and guidelines
  2. Diversion of the Colorado River
  3. Primary dam specifications
  4. Hydroelectric generation
  5. Bid documents
  6. Francis T. Crowe
  7. Six Companies

  C. Construction

  1. Construction beginning
  2. Diverting the Colorado River
  3. Preparation and excavation
  4. Constructing the dam proper
  5. Spillways
  6. Hydroelectric power plants
  7. Intake towers and penstocks

  D. Summary A. Hoover Dam Approval and Administration 1. Early political issues

  A dam to control the sometimes raging waters of the Colorado River in order to protect rapidly developing property in the Southwestern United States had been in the talking stages for many years. Although several canals had been built to distribute the Colorado more uniformly to various arid areas in the Southwest, there were times in the spring and early summer when the rise in the river would cause severe damage and loss of life; while in the fall and early winter, the river bottoms were visible.

  In 1917, a year before

  Sign up to read

  Learn more about book
• 

  No longer available |Learn more

  Geophysical Engineering

  • (Author)
  • 2014(Publication Date)
  • White Word Publications

    (Publisher)

  ________________________ WORLD TECHNOLOGIES ________________________ Chapter 15 Dam Hoover Dam, a concrete arch-gravity dam in Black Canyon of the Colorado River. Lake Mead in the background is impounded by the dam. ________________________ WORLD TECHNOLOGIES ________________________ Glen Canyon Dam A dam is a barrier that impounds water or underground streams. Dams generally serve the primary purpose of retaining water, while other structures such as floodgates or levees (also known as dikes) are used to manage or prevent water flow into specific land regions. Hydropower and pumped-storage hydroelectricity are often used in conjunction with dams to generate electricity. A dam can also be used to collect water or for storage of water which can be evenly distributed between locations. ________________________ WORLD TECHNOLOGIES ________________________ History The sizable Roman Harbaqa Dam in Syria is 21 m high and 365 m long. ________________________ WORLD TECHNOLOGIES ________________________ The Roman dam at Cornalvo in Spain has been in use for almost two millennia. Grand Anicut dam on river Kaveri in Tamil Nadu, South India (19th century on 1st-2nd century foundation) The word dam can be traced back to Middle English, and before that, from Middle Dutch, as seen in the names of many old cities. Early dam building took place in Mesopotamia and the Middle East. Dams were used to control the water level, for Mesopotamia's weather affected the Tigris and Euphrates rivers, and could be quite unpredictable. The earliest known dam is the Jawa Dam in Jordan, 100 km northeast of the capital Amman. This gravity dam featured a 4.5 m high and 1 m wide stone wall, supported by a 50 m wide earth rampart. The structure is dated to 3000 BC. The Ancient Egyptian Sadd- ________________________ WORLD TECHNOLOGIES ________________________ el-Kafara Dam at Wadi Al-Garawi, located about 25 kilometers south of Cairo, was 102 m long at its base and 87 m wide.

  Sign up to read

  Learn more about book
• 

  No longer available |Learn more

  Hydraulic Engineering

  • (Author)
  • 2014(Publication Date)
  • Research World

    (Publisher)

  ________________________ WORLD TECHNOLOGIES ________________________ Chapter 10 Dam Hoover Dam, a concrete arch-gravity dam in Black Canyon of the Colorado River. Lake Mead in the background is impounded by the dam. ________________________ WORLD TECHNOLOGIES ________________________ Glen Canyon Dam A dam is a barrier that impounds water or underground streams. Dams generally serve the primary purpose of retaining water, while other structures such as floodgates or levees (also known as dikes) are used to manage or prevent water flow into specific land regions. Hydropower and pumped-storage hydroelectricity are often used in conjunction with dams to generate electricity. A dam can also be used to collect water or for storage of water which can be evenly distributed between locations. History The sizable Roman Harbaqa Dam in Syria is 21 m high and 365 m long. ________________________ WORLD TECHNOLOGIES ________________________ The Roman dam at Cornalvo in Spain has been in use for almost two millennia. Grand Anicut dam on river Kaveri in Tamil Nadu, South India (19th century on 1st-2nd century foundation) The word dam can be traced back to Middle English, and before that, from Middle Dutch, as seen in the names of many old cities.Early dam building took place in Mesopotamia and the Middle East. Dams were used to control the water level, for Mesopotamia's weather affected the Tigris and Euphrates rivers, and could be quite unpredictable. The earliest known dam is the Jawa Dam in Jordan, 100 km northeast of the capital Amman. This gravity dam featured a 4.5 m high and 1 m wide stone wall, supported by a 50 m wide earth rampart. The structure is dated to 3000 BC. The Ancient Egyptian Sadd- ________________________ WORLD TECHNOLOGIES ________________________ el-Kafara Dam at Wadi Al-Garawi, located about 25 kilometers south of Cairo, was 102 m long at its base and 87 m wide.

  Sign up to read

  Learn more about book
• 

  eBook - ePub

  Imaging Hoover Dam

  The Making of a Cultural Icon

  • Anthony F. Arrigo(Author)
  • 2014(Publication Date)
  • University of Nevada Press

    (Publisher)

  14 For him, words are a reduction of the image, an attempt to capture through language the essence of the visual, which will inevitably elude that attempt. However, in these examples we can see that the opposite is true. The images are a reduction of the word, subservient to the headline and its ability to quickly and powerfully articulate meaning to a reader. This seems to be especially pertinent for those attempting to depict or represent the seemingly incomprehensible magnitude, or the sublimity, of the project. Though I cover the sublime and Hoover Dam imagery at length in the next chapter, it is worth noting here that in the case of Hoover Dam, the sublimity of the structure—with its sheer enormity, technological splendor, and ability to tame the untamable forces of nature—is an unmistakable visual and particularly verbal hallmark of many of these illustrated representations. The sublimity of the dam is something that image producers struggled to visually articulate, and, realizing the limits of illustrating a sublime object on the printed page, they often resorted to grandiloquent words to convey their meaning.

  Although the enormity of the project, particularly in pre-construction illustrated representations, is communicated principally through words supported by images, we will see in later representations a distinct shift away from the simplistic depictions in these examples to increasingly sophisticated, visually complex, and eventually symbolically charged imagery that is more capable of conveying the majesty of the undertaking.

  Architectural Design of the Dam

  The most visibly obvious physical characteristics of Hoover Dam relate to its architectural design, an instantly recognizable and aesthetically pleasing art deco style that thrust the dam into the public consciousness as an icon of modernism. In an early newspaper article that carried images of the dam, the September 3, 1929, Jefferson City (MO) Post-Tribune includes on page 9 the usual awe-inspiring headline “3000 Men Toil for Seven Years in Building of Huge Boulder Dam,” yet in that article we also find a fully developed architectural vision of the completed dam without the sketched lines and statistical labels typical of other contemporaneous depictions. This article features two images: “Today,” a grainy photo of the canyon without added detail, and another image below showing a comprehensive rendering of what engineers imagined the completed dam would look like in 1937 (figure 3.05

  Sign up to read

  Learn more about book
• 

  eBook - ePub

  Facility Siting

  Risk, Power and Identity in Land Use Planning

  • Asa Boholm, Ragnar E. Lofstedt(Authors)
  • 2013(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  Harrington also studied the ancient salt cave at St Thomas (located upstream at the edge of the river and soon to be flooded by Lake Mead), which he also identified as having been mined by Indian people for thousands of years, as indicated by the artefacts remaining there (Harrington, 1970). More concerned with saving the ancient past than contemporary Indian cultures, he apparently never conveyed any sense of the cultural inappropriateness of either his excavations or the dam construction to his sponsors or his scientific colleagues. Science and Indian culture were separated by these events, while the relations between science and federal agency were strengthened.

  GREATER GOOD

  Hoover Dam was constructed in 1933 and a two-lane road was built on the top of the dam linking east to west, Arizona to Nevada. As the west grew and tourism increased, the dam became a destination site for tourists, who came with the purpose of viewing the wonders of modern engineering. Soon honeymooners would stop and photograph each other on top of the dam on their way to or from Las Vegas. They were to create a shared ‘national viewscape’ that has come to be considered worthy of cultural preservation by federal management agencies.

  Sixty years after construction, the road is filled daily with trucks and automobiles trying to save a few kilometres by crossing the dam instead of travelling across highway bridges to the south. In direct proximity and conflict with these vehicles are thousands of tourists who stand centimetres away from the traffic taking photographs of Lake Mead or Black Canyon, while being awed by the hydroelectric power lines emanating from the belly of the dam. The mix is hazardous and standing lines of vehicles have become the norm.

  The Hoover Dam bypass project was designed to reduce the traffic delays and volume over the dam by either diverting traffic to one of the existing bridges to the south or constructing a new bridge. Fourteen possible proposals were considered during the project’s ten-year long life span. All but three bridge locations at the dam site were rejected by 1997 when the final environmental impact statement (EIS) was begun. After seven years of environmental impact studies, and all but 3 of 14 alternatives had been rejected, American Indian tribes were initially consulted and ethnographic studies began.

  Consultation between American Indian tribes and US federal agencies is a formal process largely defined by law and regulation (Stoffle, 2000). Key in the process is Executive Order 13175, which specifies that consultation will be on a government-to-government basis, thus reflecting the dependent nations status of tribes within the US (Deloria and Lytle, 1984). Critical to consultation is the willingness to share power on the part of the federal agency. Consultation without shared power has been characterized as co-option, while co-management occurs when real partnerships are established between tribes and agencies (Parenteau, 1988).

  Sign up to read

  Learn more about book
• 

  eBook - PDF

  Engineering Geology and Geotechnics

  • F. G. Bell(Author)
  • 2013(Publication Date)
  • Newnes

    (Publisher)

  Properly constructed gravity dams with adequate foundations are probably among the safest of all dams. A favourable site is usually one in a constricted area of a valley where sound bedrock is reasonably close to the surface, both in the floor and abutments. An important consideration in some areas of the world is the availability within a reasonable hauling distance of adequate deposits of suitable aggregate for concrete. An arch dam consists of a concrete wall, of high strength concrete, curved in plan, with its convex face pointing upstream {Figure 7.2). Arch dams are Figure 7.2 Aerial view of Hoover Dam and Lake Mead. The world-famous dam, completed in 1935 spans the Colorado between Nevada and Arizona, providing multipurpose benefits; flood protection, river control, water storage, and conservation for irrigation and low-cost hydroelectric energy. (Courtesy of United States Bureau of Reclamation) relatively thin walled and lighter in weight than gravity dams. They will stand up to large deflections in the foundation rock provided that the deflections are uniformly distributed. They transmit most of the horizontal thrust of the reservoir water to the abutments by arch action and this, together with their relative thinness, means that they impose high stresses upon narrow zones at the base as well as the abutments. Therefore the strength of the rock mass at the abutments and immediately down-valley of the dam must be unquestionable, and its modulus of elasticity must be high enough to ensure that its deformation under thrust from the arch is not so great as to induce excessive stresses in the Dams and Dam Sites 277 arch. Ideal locations for arch dams are provided by narrow gorges where the walls are capable of withstanding the thrust produced by the arch action. The arch itself must be well keyed into the abutments. If the load on the abutments and foundation are about equal then the dam is called a gravity-arch dam.

  Sign up to read

  Learn more about book