Hoover Dam and the Development of the American West

Hoover Dam was begun at a time when the Great Depression had reached its worst period. It was one of the most ambitious engineering projects envisioned, either before or since. While it conferred minimal benefit on the Pacific Southwest at the time, subsequent accidents of history made the dam pivotal in the region’s ultimate development.

The dam was like many Depression-era projects in that it was make-work rather than something that filled an existing need. In 1931, the year the dam’s construction began, Los Angeles was the only major city in the Southwest. Phoenix, Tucson, and Albuquerque were small, dusty desert towns, their economies supported by ranching and mining. San Diego was a sleepy naval base. Las Vegas was little more than a railroad whistle stop, albeit newly energized by the legalization of gambling. The city of Los Angeles had looked to the Colorado to fill its water needs, but the farms of the Imperial Valley were already using that water. The power that would be generated when Lake Mead was full was not needed at the time.

Thousands of men, many with their families, flocked to Black Canyon, the dam’s site, hoping to find work. Only a small fraction of those were hired, while the rest populated a shantytown nearby. Workers were housed in a new purpose-built city, Boulder City, five miles from the dam’s site. Dunar and McBride (2001) remarked that “As word spread across the country that Hoover Dam was one of the few places where work might be found, people began drifting into southern Nevada…by 1931, thousands of desperate families crowded into Las Vegas hoping to find jobs at Black Canyon” (p. 23). At construction’s peak, slightly over 5,000 men were employed, so there were always thousands more waiting for openings. These openings rarely came, except when a worker was injured or killed; it was said that when someone fell from the dam’s face to his death, the line would form at the employment office before the echoes of his screams had died out.

The effect of so many desperate men wanting work was that the companies building the dam had a completely free hand. Workers toiled in dangerous conditions, often using unproven construction techniques. Daytime temperatures in the summer routinely topped 110 degrees, while inside the tunnels that were being excavated, temperatures would reach 140 degrees. Any attempt by workers to improve their working conditions was rebuffed, and strikes were quickly snuffed out. Stevens (1990), in describing one of the many fatal events that occurred during the dam’s construction, remarked that “The workers…risked injury or death every time they went down into Black Canyon” (p. 183). In fact, 112 workers died during the dam’s construction (Stevens, 1990, p. 45), and many times that number were injured, many seriously enough that they had to leave the worksite permanently. Falling, being struck by equipment, and being hit by rocks and debris from above were routine, everyday hazards for the Hoover Dam workers. Yet, despite the danger and the brutal working conditions, the workers welcomed a steady paycheck and the chance to participate in something great.

Dedicated by President Franklin D. Roosevelt, Hoover Dam was completed two years ahead of schedule, in early 1936. Water levels in Lake Mead became high enough to bring the first power generator on line by the end of 1936, though it took approximately six more years for the dam to fill completely. The last turbine generator was not made operational until 1961. Nonetheless, the dam’s effects were immediately felt. Downstream, the threat of seasonal flooding was over. A reliable water supply was collected behind the dam, ensuring that Los Angeles’s needs would be met. The benefit of power generation, at first considered to be secondary, was a huge boon to wartime industries in California beginning in 1941. The other benefit, anticipated by almost no one, was that the dam’s power generation and water storage would enable the building of large cities in the formerly underpopulated Southwest, due to the invention of air conditioning.

The Colorado River Compact of 1922 divided up the river’s water between the seven states in the river’s basin: California, Nevada, Arizona, Utah, Colorado, New Mexico, and Wyoming. California, however, took more than its share for several decades, since Nevada and Arizona had no need for their allocations, given their limited population at the time. This arrangement was satisfactory to all (California paid the other states for its “overdraft” in a number of ways) until the invention of air conditioning, which coincided with the postwar Baby Boom. Hoover Dam’s massive power generation now had a destination. Suddenly, places like Phoenix and Las Vegas were livable year-round. Phoenix in particular became popular as a retirement destination. Millions of people moved to the Southwest, aka the “Sun Belt,” in one of the greatest migrations in American history. Soon, Arizona and Nevada wanted the water that had been allocated to them by the Compact. But there was a problem.

The Colorado River Compact was drafted just after the decade of the greatest amount of precipitation seen in the Colorado Basin before or since. This was, however, for the purpose of allocating the river’s water, taken as an average decade. The result is that during any period when the watershed’s precipitation is not at its historical maximum (essentially, all the time), the river is “in deficit.” In other words, either the main stem reservoirs have to be drawn down, or somebody doesn’t get their allotment. Hundley (2009) noted this basic problem, which in a larger sense affects the entire American West: “This book is about an alleged peace treaty, the Colorado River Compact…but…it is really about war…the life and death of cities in an enormous area were at stake” (p. ix). For the last several decades, an uncivil war has raged as Phoenix, Las Vegas, Los Angeles, and San Diego compete for a source of water that historically, has never been able to meet all their demands at once.

There is also the issue of environmental damage. The river below the dam has been reduced to almost nothing, with the effect being the destruction of fisheries and the estuary at the mouth of the river. The river’s downstream water is used, drained, then used again, with the effect of concentrating pesticides, minerals, and worst of all, salt in the water. In order to meet treaty obligations with Mexico to deliver “a guaranteed annual quantity of 1,500,000 acre-feet of the waters of the Colorado river” (Brownell & Eaton, 1975, p. 255) per year, a massive desalinization plant had to be built in Yuma, Arizona in 1982, at a cost of $250 million. It also takes about $23 million/year to run it. These costs should be subtracted from any economic gains from the building of mainstream dams on the Colorado (which include not only Hoover Dam but also Parker and Glen Canyon Dams).

The net effect of building Hoover Dam could not have been foreseen, and if it had, its enabling of the explosive growth of the Southwest would probably have been seen as a good thing. Today, however, it has become apparent that the cheap power and water that enabled that growth has been anything but an unmixed blessing. Classically, populations grow not just until there is a shortage of resources, but well beyond that point, until a water crisis occurs as has happened in Somalia. That crisis is fast approaching. With the ongoing drought in the Southwest (three years to ten years, depending on the definition of “drought”), the question of water supply has become more than just academic. None of the states want to engage in the massive conservation efforts that would be necessary to cut their consumption to the point where the Colorado would not be in deficit. Instead, they have drawn down Lake Mead and Lake Powell to where they presently stand at below 50% of capacity. This is like using up your savings account to pay off your credit card bills, while continuing to run up charges. In the absence of drastic conservation efforts, the Southwest will run out of water, and soon. This is the ultimate legacy of Hoover Dam.

References

Brownell, H., & Eaton, S. D. (1975). The Colorado River salinity problem with Mexico. The American Journal of International Law, 69(2), 255-271.

Dunar, A. J., & McBride, D. (2001). Building Hoover Dam: An oral history of the Great Depression. Reno, NV: University of Nevada Press.

Hundley, N. (2009). Water and the West: The Colorado River Compact and the politics of water in the American West. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press.

Stevens, J. E. (1990). Hoover Dam: An American adventure. Tulsa, OK: University of Oklahoma Press.