Hoover Dam

Hoover Dam is frakking (Battlestar Galactic reference, get with it people) amazing.  I made it there on August 28th, and so far it is my favorite place I've seen.  I loved it, not sure why, but I would move to Nevada for the sole reason of seeing the Hoover Dam every weekend, that's how great it was.

Awesome

The history of the Dam is really interesting, when first built it was named the Boulder Dam because it is located by Boulder City, NV, but later changed to Hoover Dam in 1947 because Herbert Hoover was a huge supporter of the building of the dam.

View from inside

The dam was built for "flood control; improvement of navigation and regulation of the Colorado River; storage and delivery of Colorado River waters for reclamation of public lands and other beneficial uses exclusively withing the United states; and hydroelectric power production."

Nevada side

Construction began 1931 and finished 1935, two years ahead of schedule and was under budget.  Being under budget and ahead of schedule was not a surprise considering the workers only got two unpaid holidays a year; Christmas and Fourth of July.  If they missed a day of work they were fired and only made $4 a week, which they had to pay $1.60 back for food, lodging, and transportation.  There's not an exact number of the workers that died for many reasons.  If you died on the way to the hospital it did not count as a death caused by the dam. and many died of carbon monoxide poisoning, but the owners would pay off doctors and judges to change cause of death to pneumonia, so those deaths weren't counted either and their families didn't get a pay out.  Basically the people running this dam construction were dicks.

Lake Mead

Every 17 to 20 years a rotor needs to be cleaned and rebuilt, and I lucked out and got my tour on one of those days.  The floors where the rotors are located come apart and it is taken out using a crane.  To tour the whole dam is about $30, a little pricey, but totally worth it in my opinion.  You get to go way down into the Dam and you get a really good history lesson in the process.

Rotor

According to my tour guide the dams life expectancy is over 2000 years, but the reservoir; Lake Mead has been losing ten feet of water every year for the past ten years, so there's no telling how long the dam will be used.

View from Mike O'Callaghan-Pat Tillman Memorial Bridge

My favorite place was on the Mike O'Callaghan-Pat Tillman Memorial Bridge, which connects Nevada and Arizona.  You can see all of the Hoover Dam from that spot.  Building of the bridge started in 2005 and finished 2010, same length of time as the Hoover Dam, but I'm sure these guys were treated much better than the Dam workers.