50-Year-Old Hoover Dam Fulfills a Massive Promise

The dam site was linked to Las Vegas by a 23-mile long spur of the UnionPacific Railroad, which delivered to the site 5 million barrels of cement (enough to pave a 16-foot wide highway from San Francisco to New York City), 18 million pounds of steel, 21 million pounds of gates and valves and 840 miles of pipe. At least 96 men perished during construction, frequently from heat exhaustion.

Fifty years ago, President Franklin D. Roosevelt gazed across a 6-million-ton wall of concrete straddling the cliffs above a muddy expanse of the Colorado River and said, “The transformation wrought here is a 20th-Century marvel.”

Surrounded by 10,000 cheering dignitaries and laborers at the dedication of Hoover Dam on Sept. 30, 1935, Roosevelt praised it as one of the world’s great engineering feats that would rein in the mighty Colorado River, bring water and power to the people and spark employment during the Great Depression.

On its golden anniversary, the dam has fulfilled its promise and more.

Roosevelt could not have foreseen that Hoover Dam, a symbol of hope in an era of economic collapse, would help make possible the nation’s swift mobilization in World War II and the peacetime industry and population boom that followed in Southern California.

Its power, surging to Los Angeles, fueled aircraft companies, ship builders and arms manufacturers, making the region the nation’s arsenal and laying the groundwork for today’s aerospace industry. That same power launched some of the nation’s first “electrify your home” campaigns, inducing unprecedented demand for labor-saving devices, from electric egg beaters and toasters to refrigerators and stoves. Water held back by the dam also prevented chronic flooding and for the first time ensured reliable irrigation of 700,000 acres in the arid California and Arizona desert, which together now produce more than a billion dollars’ worth of crops a year.

“Without that water and power,” said attorney Northcutt Ely, gazing out his office window overlooking smog-shrouded Los Angeles, “this would have been a much smaller community.”

More than five decades after he helped negotiate the contracts that led to the dam’s construction, Ely, 82, is still amazed it happened at all.

“Back then, the risks were so great and the disputes so bitter,” he recalled, “that prospects for failure were much greater than the prospects for success.”

Yet succeed it did. Although today Los Angeles draws only 3% of its electricity each year from the dam, for the first 20 years of the project’s existence, it met more than 50% of the city’s electrical demands.

Now, after painful negotiations, the dam’s power contracts have been redrawn so that more power will be directed toward central Arizona and southern Nevada. This year, Arizona will also take its share of water stored at the dam to its controversial Central Arizona Project to be pumped to the thirsty boomtowns of Phoenix and Tucson. Southern California is scrambling to implement conservation projects and find water elsewhere to meet its own growing demands.

Meanwhile, Hoover Dam is just beginning to show signs of age. In the last year, two of its 17 generators shorted out, but there are plans to upgrade them with improved wiring and parts. At the same time, the concrete in the dam is still curing and actually growing stronger each day.

On June 1, 1987, the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation will assume full control of the dam, which has been operated jointly by the bureau, the Los Angeles Department of Water & Power and Southern California Edison Co. The dam’s main operations, which have been handled manually since 1935, will then be controlled out of a computerized complex in Phoenix.

Thomas E. Rowland, the department superintendent who has worked at the dam for 33 years, expressed concern over the change. He pointed to what he called a tradition of “cost overruns and inefficiency” in federal government projects that may translate at the dam to “power costs far beyond what people are paying now.”

Bureau engineers, he said, have already suggested installing new equipment in place of parts that may not need replacing. Doubts about the move to computerize dam operations, he added, led the department to wrangle an option with the bureau to maintain control of six generators for another 10 years.

Bureau authorities, however, contend that single ownership combined with new technology will make dam operations more efficient.

“Reclamation will save considerable money by operating as one plant,” said Ben Wilkinson, Hoover Dam project manager. “All the (power generating) units will run at peak efficiency.”

The saga of Hoover Dam is rooted in controversy and turbulence.

Before the dam, there was the river--an unruly course of chocolate-colored water meandering 1,400 miles from the snow-covered slopes of the Rocky Mountains to the Gulf of Mexico. The Colorado River and its tributaries drain a 246,000-square-mile basin encompassing parts of seven states--Wyoming, Utah, Colorado, New Mexico, Arizona, Nevada and California.

At its southern end, farmers who settled the Imperial Valley region in the early 1900s were at constant war with the river. It flowed ankle-deep in summer but raged in a muddy torrent in spring, uprooting trees, breaching levees and destroying farmlands and homes. Even in the best of times, the water carried so much silt that farmers were helpless to prevent canals and ditches from clogging, which prevented delivery of water to crops.

Disastrous Flood

After a disastrous flood in 1905, these farmers sought federal help in building a canal north of the U.S.-Mexican border that would link them to the river, provide a steady supply of water for irrigation and reduce the threat of flooding.

In 1917, the U.S. Interior secretary investigated the feasibility of building such an “All-American Canal.” A year later, Arthur Powell Davis, the chief engineer of the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation, proposed a high dam on the river that would remove silt and store water for Imperial Valley farms.

“Dams were clearly called for,” said William Myers, an historian employed by Southern California Edison Co. “But who would build them and receive what benefit from them and their location were to be the subject of countless arguments over the next 20 years.”

Enter Los Angeles.

Phenomenal Growth

By 1920, Los Angeles, which had grown a phenomenal 600% in the preceding 20 years, had claimed most of the available sources of power and water in the southern portions of the state. To sustain such growth the city would need additional supplies. As a result, it joined forces with the Imperial Valley farmers and leaders in Washington who called for a dam and aqueduct system on the Colorado River.

“Los Angeles was a ringleader in going after the dam first for electrical power and later for water,” said Norris Hundley, professor of history at UCLA. “In the arid West, you don’t grow unless you have water.”

Before any dam or aqueduct could be built, however, a plan for dividing the water among the seven states and Mexico had to be devised.

Compact Signed

After two years of bickering over water rights, the then-secretary of Commerce, Herbert Hoover, led a marathon bargaining session at Santa Fe, N. M., that culminated in the signing of the Colorado River Compact on Nov. 22, 1922.

The deal divided the river’s drainage area into an upper basin and lower basin at Lee Ferry, a point on the river a few miles south of the Arizona-Utah border. Each basin was allotted 7.5 million acre-feet of water a year. The lower basin was also granted a right to increase its share by 1 million acre-feet a year, if needed. The “upper basin” applied to those parts of Arizona, Colorado, New Mexico, Utah and Wyoming that drained Colorado River water north of Lee Ferry. “Lower basin” applied to those portions below Lee Ferry.

When presented to the legislatures of the Colorado River Basin states and Congress for ratification, Myers said, Hoover’s deal, far from settling the water rights issue, “unleashed massive political controversy that persisted for 10 years.”

Much of the controversy centered on Arizona’s fear that more-developed states, particularly California, would take the lion’s share of the potential benefits that a high dam on the river would provide.

Enter Mulholland

William Mulholland, then chief engineer of the Los Angeles Department of Water & Power, exacerbated those fears in 1923 when he boldly initiated his own investigation into prospects for pumping Colorado River water to Southern California.

Out of his efforts came the Municipal Water District, which Los Angeles city officials swiftly created with nearby communities to pump Colorado River water west. (It was later renamed the Metropolitan Water District.)

Five years later, on Dec. 21, 1928, Congress passed the landmark Boulder Canyon Act. Signed into law by President Calvin Coolidge, it approved the compact water allocations and authorized $165 million--a substantial portion of the federal budget at the time--for construction of a dam and “All-American Canal.”

But before construction could begin, the new law stipulated that the Interior secretary had to secure contracts to repay the cost of the dam within 50 years. The idea was to sell electrical power generated by the dam. The only potential markets for the electricity were 240 miles west of the river in Southern California. There, a new battle erupted between the water department and Edison, which were the only utilities large enough to afford to buy and distribute power generated at the dam.

“Edison could foresee that if DWP got Hoover Dam as a resource,” Ely said, “it (Edison) would lose Los Angeles as a customer.”

Deadlock Averted

Hoping to stave off a deadlock, the then-Interior secretary, Ray Lyman Wilbur, sent his executive assistant, 26-year-old Ely, on a mission to Los Angeles in the spring of 1930 to hammer out a compromise.

That April 30, the utilities signed a contract under which Edison would generate for itself and other investor-owned utilities and the department would generate for the states, municipal utilities and the Metropolitan Water District. The contract amounted to a gamble because it bound the companies to purchase power from the dam whether they used it or not.

With the contract under his arm, Ely boarded a tri-motor Ford airplane at a local airstrip and set off for Washington in a race to head off efforts by Arizona to marshall its congressional forces and block the project. The plane landed at Kansas City. There, Ely boarded an overnight train for St. Louis, where an open-cockpit U.S. Army trainer plane waited to carry him on the last leg of the journey.

In the air, the pilot yelled over the drone of the engine that he was lost.

“To find out where we were,” Ely said, “we had to buzz railroad stations and read the signs on the side of the buildings.”

A Day Later

A day after leaving Los Angeles, Ely presented the documents to Wilbur.

Four months later, Congress appropriated $10 million to begin construction of the world’s tallest dam. In 1931, the largest contract let by the United States up to that time went to a San Francisco-based consortium of six companies, which bid $48.89 million for the job.

Meanwhile, the water department and Edison found themselves in the precarious position of having to create a market large enough to absorb the power they had purchased, or face severe financial losses.

With the cooperation of 750 appliance dealers in Southern California, Edison launched a $1 million advertising campaign extolling the virtues of electrical power, Myers said. Billboards proclaimed, “Get Your Electric Range Now.” Demonstration booths unveiled “Wife-Saving Electric Kitchens.”

Similarly, the water department “had a group of college graduates from UCLA and USC give talks at schools, homes, churches and elsewhere explaining the importance of the project,” recalled Robert Lee, retired assistant manager of media relations for the department.

The Payoff

The load-building campaigns paid off.

“Millions of dollars of electrical appliances were sold during the 1930s and the use of kilowatts climbed,” Myers said.

In 1935 alone, 35,000 refrigerators, 30,000 washing machines and 50,000 radios were sold in the Los Angeles area and “electrification” was extended “into hitherto non-traditional uses, such as egg-hatching, oil-pumping and welding,” Myers said.

By that time, work was well under way in the canyon 30 miles east of Las Vegas where 5,000 workers from across the nation toiled in the scorching heat of the desert. Most lived in tents near Boulder City, a model city built by the government to accommodate the workers.

Las Vegas Link

The town was linked to Las Vegas by a 23-mile spur of the Union Pacific Railroad, which delivered to the site 5 million barrels of cement--enough to pave a 16-foot-wide highway from San Francisco to New York, 18 million pounds of steel, 21 million pounds of gates and valves and 840 miles of pipe.

At least 96 men died during construction, frequently from heat exhaustion.

Boulder City resident S. L. (Red) Wixson, 76, was a tractor operator in the canyon. It was there he learned a rule of thumb appropriate to the time and the place: “Build a dam, kill a man.”

“Gosh, I remember when a 2-inch hose connected to a jackhammer broke and started whipping around blowing two men off the wall,” said Wixson, sitting in the den of his home, which is covered with dam photographs and memorabilia. “But it burns the hell out of me to hear people say we didn’t value the lives of those men.”

Artisans, Too

Artisans also left their mark at the dam. Inside the edifice are miles of stylized galleries, staircases, walkways and machinery that make Hoover Dam a monument to the Art Deco style of architecture. A map on the dam’s western flank even shows the exact location of the stars on the day it was finished.

The dam was completed two years ahead of schedule. It towered 726 feet above bedrock and stretched 1,244 feet across Black Canyon on the Arizona-Nevada border. Its white face would hold back 32 million acre-feet of water, enough water to supply 32 million families of five for a year. Its generators would produce 4 billion kilowatt hours of electricity a year, enough to power 600,000 homes.

L.A. Celebrates

Zack Farmer, who had achieved world fame running the 1932 Olympic Games, organized an “electrical pageant” to celebrate the first arrival of the dam-generated electricity to Los Angeles.

On Oct. 9, 1936, a million Los Angeles residents gathered downtown to witness the spectacle. At 7:15 p.m., a golden key was pressed, great arc lights illuminated a parade and the crowd roared in approval.

Los Angeles Times reporter Paul Whitney covered the spectacle from an airplane.

“Stabbed by hundreds of silver lances,” he wrote, “the heavens over the Southland were transformed into day last night when the titanic energy of an impounded Colorado River was loosed in a flood of light which bathed the metropolitan area in luminous pigment.”

With Hoover Dam in place, additional dams and water diversion systems were established on the river. The Southern California desert blossomed into a lush agricultural region. Population and industry in Los Angeles, San Diego, Las Vegas and Phoenix boomed.

“Without that water this area is worthless,” said Ronald Hull, spokesman for the Imperial Irrigation District. “Now, year-round agricultural production makes it the eighth-largest vegetable production area in the United States.”

The lettuce, carrots, cauliflower, asparagus, grapes, dates, citrus fruits and alfalfa grown in the Imperial, Coachella and Palo Verde valleys, he added, “generate more wealth than gold ever did in California.”

First Priorities

The dam’s first priorities have been flood control and water storage. But with the advent of World War II, the nation needed the electricity it produced to mobilize its unprepared military industries.

Linked to Hoover Dam’s hydroelectric plants by a 266-mile transmission line, the greater Los Angeles area became what one historian described as the “nation’s arsenal for democracy.”

Of the 303,000 aircraft built between 1940 and 1945, 62,000, or about one-fifth, were made at plants in the Los Angeles area, said Harry Gann, manager of aircraft information at Douglas Aircraft Co., Long Beach. Lightweight airplane parts were fashioned out of aluminum extruded at local plants that swallowed enormous amounts of electricity generated at the dam, he said. These parts were used at Lockheed, Douglas Aircraft and North American Aviation (now Rockwell International), among others, to make thousands of C-47 transport planes, A-20 attack planes, P-51 Mustangs and B-25 bombers, to name a few.

Postwar Fears

After the war, fearing that many of the military companies would vacate the area resulting in massive layoffs, the water department again launched a media blitz advertising the availability of low-cost power.

“The anticipated recession did not occur,” department spokesman Robert Lee said.

Instead, the defense companies stayed and the plentiful electrical power drew new industries to the area. Goodyear, Alcoa Aluminum, Kaiser Steel, the Long Beach Naval Shipyards along with numerous automobile manufacturers, military contractors and aircraft companies were direct beneficiaries. Southern California became one of the most prosperous areas in the world.

Prominence Has Diminished

In recent years, Hoover Dam’s prominence has diminished in terms of size. Once the tallest dam in the world, it was dwarfed in 1961 by the 935 foot-tall dam built at Grand Dixence in Switzerland. Once the most massive, Hoover Dam has lost that distinction to the New Cornelia Tailings earthfill dam near Ajo, Ariz., which is 63 times as voluminous.

Still, it continues to serve as an important safety net for Southern California, Arizona and Nevada. In peak-use periods, its power can be brought on line instantly. In times of drought, the water it stores can be diverted to areas in need.

During the severe drought of 1976-77, for example, “we pumped Colorado River Aqueduct water bringing every drop we could to Southern California,” Metropolitan Water District spokeswomen JoAnn Lundgren said. “That enabled us to not have to draw on state Water Project entitlements. That water was instead used in the San Joaquin Valley and Marin County.”

And, with proper maintenance, Ely said, “Hoover Dam will be plugging away indefinitely.”

CHANGING POWER ALLOCATION

The Metropolitan Water District (MWD) uses power to pump water from the Colorado Rover to points throughout Southern California.

The Los Angeles Department of Water and Power (DWP) serves the City of Los Angeles.

Southern California Edison (SCE) has residential and commercial customers throughout Southern California.

MUNI serves Glendale, Burbank, Pasadena.

Other: Anaheim, Riverside, Vernon, Colton, Banning, Azusa.

EXISTING

Recipients kwhr (in millions) % CALIFORNIA MUNI 156 4.0 SCE 269 6.9 DWP 643 16.5 MWD 1372 35.3 Nevada 766 19.7 Arizona 686 17.6

NEW

Recipients kwhr (in millions) % CALIFORNIA MUNI 147 3.2 SCE 251 5.5 DWP 698 15.5 MWD 1292 28.5 Nevada 1138 25.1 Arizona 858 19.0 Other 143 3.2

HOW HOOVER PRODUCES ELECTRICITY Hoover--once the world’s tallest dam--holds back enough water to supply 32 million families of five for a year. Its 17 generators can produce enough electricity to power 600,000 homes for a year. DAM----DIRECTION OF WATER FLOW----GENERATOR----ELECTRICITY----TRANSFORMER----CIRCUIT BREAKER----TRANSMISSION LINES----ELECTRICITY Hoover forces water through hydraulic turbines that turn mounted electromagnets inside the huge generators pictured above, center. Electricity flows to a transformer, where its voltage is increased for delivery to receiving stations over transmission lines.