One of the things I really wanted to do while down in the Vegas area was to go over and learn more about the Hoover Dam. It was after all the largest dam in the world at the time it was built and one of the first of its kind. I also thought it would be a great field trip for the kids to learn more about its history. We ended up stopping at what we thought was the Hoover Dam visitors center, but it ended up being the Lake Mead visitors center. Still we had fun going through the center, becoming Junior rangers by learning about the area, and then watching a movie about the many uses of Lake mead. We also got to learn some interesting facts about the Hoover Dam, like how it took 5 years to build and 5000 workers to build it. And that it was built in 1936 and supplies most of Nevada, and parts of Arizona and California with water and electricity. It was pretty cool to learn about.
Picture of the kids outside the visitors center with Lake mead in the background and their Jr. Rangers pins on their shirts.
From there we headed over to the Hoover Dam and got to go under the new bridge they’ve made for cars to more easily pass through this area.
Surprisingly the line to get to the Dam was incredibly long and took us about 15-20 minutes to get through. Who knew that the Dam was such a hot tourist attraction? We ended up parking up North of the Dam and across the bridge where parking was free. Otherwise it was $10 to park at the visitors center. We ended up dropping Grandma off at the Dam and then the kids and I parked and walked down. I really was impressed with the Dam though. Such an amazing structure!
If you look at the white lines around the lake you can see how low it is right now.
This next picture is the overfill area where if the lake gets too high it can spill over into these big areas and then is distributed further down stream through big huge tunnels. The lake hasn’t had to use this over flow area since 1983 though.
This is the great big hole that the water flows through if the lake starts overflowing. They don’t look that impressive but this is probably the biggest man made hole I’ve ever seen! The pictures don’t do it justice.
It was really quite cool to be able to get so close to the Dam though and see what a huge structure it is. I can’t even begin to imagine the feat it was to build this thing!
On the north side of the Dam they have a little memorial for those who died during the construction of the dam. Although they don’t tell you on the plagues how many died. I looked it up later and there were 96 men that died from work on the dam. Either from drowning, or blasting, falling rocks or slides, falls from canyon walls, being struck by heavy equipment, truck accidents etc. But that statistic only covered industrial accidents and not other causes of death like heat, heart troubles, etc.
But pretty crazy to think about how many people gave their lives in the construction of the Dam.
We also learned that the Hoover Dam was the largest Dam of the time and created the largest reservoir in the United States when it was built. The Lake mead reservoir covers 248 square miles and is capable of holding some 28.9 million acre-feet of water (with each acre-foot holding 325,000 gallons of water). Building the dam also caused the flooding of several smaller towns that had been settled by early Mormon pioneers.
Another interesting fact was that although the Hoover Dam required about 5,000 workers daily to build the dam. There were 21,000 people employed to help build the dam with a preference for veterans in the Spanish American war and World War I. The men working on the dam were paid hourly and received between .50 to 1.25 depending on their job.
The Hoover Dam was also the worlds largest/tallest Dam until 1968 until California’s Oroville Dam was built which is 770 feet high. But the larges Dam in the world is currently China’s 1001 foot tall Jingping Dam. The Hoover Dam is still one of the worlds largest hydroelectric stations though and can generate around 4 billion kilowatt hours.
During world war II the Dam also was said to be a target bomb threat from the Germans and so it was off limits to tourism for quite some time and was guarded heavily. The Dam had its own police force and then the U.S. army offered up some personnel help as well. The Dam reopened to the public in Sept 1945.
Sure was an enlightening and fun field trip with the kids and Mumsie. I loved learning so much about the this amazing structure.
