Saturday commemorates the 89th anniversary of the Hoover Dam’s completed construction, considered by most experts “a modern miracle” and one of the most visited sites in the world.
The 726-foot-high arch-gravity dam stretches 1,244 feet across the Black Canyon and was built over five years starting in 1931, helping provide water and hydroelectrical power to the West. The now-second-tallest dam was proposed to prevent flooding from Rocky Mountain snow-melting waters into the Colorado River, stretching south to the Gulf of California for more than 1,000 miles.
Constructed along the Colorado River at the border of Nevada and Arizona, more than 21,000 workers helped erect the dam, situated about 30 miles southeast of Las Vegas, during the Great Depression, one of the nation’s most turbulent times in history, said Robert Glennon, a water policy and law expert and emeritus professor at the University of Arizona.
Construction on the dam was completed on March 1, 1936, according to the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation
“It is an American icon if there ever was one,” said Glennon, author of the book, “Unquenchable, America’s Water Crises and What To Do About It.” “Given that it was built during the Depression, I consider it a modern miracle.”
The Hoover Dam captures water from the Colorado River and fills Lake Mead. The dam also generates enough energy each year to serve 1.3 million people in Nevada, Arizona and California, the Reclamation Bureau said.
“That dam and the water stored became a very important piece of almost all of the uses in those lower basin states,” said Jennifer Gimbel, a senior water policy scholar for the Colorado Water Center at Colorado State University. “They are controlling the water and move their economies forward to get water when they wanted it and helped the economies in all three of those states.
“The dam helped build Nevada, as the state felt that building it would bring economic development,” Gimbel added.