HOOVER DAM

Hoover Dam

The Story of Hoover Dam - Articles

Fortune Magazine - September 1933 (continued)

It is in these matters of personnel, organization, and efficiency rather than in miracles of machinery that Boulder Dam is unique in engineering history. No problems have arisen which have not been solved before on other dams. The machines differ from previous ones principally in their gigantic size. The biggest trucks in the world had to be designed and built by Mack .Powered with 250-horsepower motors and equipped with special duralumin bodies, they are capable of waddling away with sixteen cubic yards of earth–just twice the capacity of the biggest truck hitherto. Babcock & Wilcox of Barberton, Ohio, is building $10,908,000 worth of piping at a special plant erected one mile from the dam site. A General Electric unit will X-ray every inch of welding in the two and eight-tenths miles of penstocks (giant pipes carrying water from dam to power house). This world's record X-ray job involves 159,000 separate pictures and 24,000,000 square inches of film-a prodigious guaranty of welding quality. The government cableway which spans the abyss has five times the capacity of any earlier cableway. Built by Ledgerwood Manufacturing Co. of Elizabeth, New Jersey, it has six steel ropes bigger than the average man's wrist (three and one-half inches diameter) and can lower 150 tons of concrete or steel hundreds of feet from the upper workings to the pit. Engineers say it could take 200 tons or more. The roller cradle which runs along the cable dangling these crushing weights is as big as a box car. The turbines and generators for the power plant are also the largest to date: four of the turbines, contracted for by Allis-Chalmers, will turn up 115,000 horsepower apiece. The fifty-foot diversion tunnels dwarf New York's subway tubes. Fantastic machines called Jumbos run on rails into these tunnels. One has thirty-two air drills to perforate the rock; another has seven platforms, like the carriages on a ferris wheel, and carries the men who trim the walls after the rock has been blasted out; another lines the walls with. concrete--an eighty-foot section at a stop. Many of the tools in Black Canyon are on a similar scale, too big and too complicated for the layman to grasp without extensive comparative pictures and diagrams. But the engineers are modestly positive on one point: among the dam's legacies to the world will be numbered no new machine device. No puzzles of construction or design have faced them that have not been solved before. The major problem has been the job's brutal size.

Having solved this, their first and most vital task was to divert the unruly river from its bed. Once they had it dammed and turned into the diversion tunnels, the risk of sudden flood sweeping their work away was passed. From that point on the bosses--and particularly the directors of the Six Companies--breathed easily. Nothing short of earthquake could stop them. Their present sense of security and most pardonable pride is one of the sharpest impressions one gets at Boulder Dam. They are not relaxing, but they know they have won. All they have to do now to rear their monument is to keep at it.

Accustomed to thinking in giant terms they are not particularly moved because the dam has been given a new label by the Roosevelt Administration. The reversion of the name from Hoover Dam to Boulder Dam is considered around Black Canyon as politics. It is unofficially estimated that the shift may cost the U.S. some $200,000 in printing bills to change the staggering mass of documentary record that a dam entails. But that is no concern of the builders. Their world is bounded by the desert mountains and their lives are for the current years dedicated to a job. It merely occurs to them to wonder, in smoky discussions after sundown in Boulder City why Washington, if it was bent on changing names, did not at least consider Davis Dam.

Arthur P. Davis is the man who in 1902 conceived of Boulder, watched his idea become merely a political springboard and then, at seventy-two returned to help materialize his vision. Just one month later he died.

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