Go west, young man:  2013 vacation, Day 4

Wednesday morning, it was hot.  It was Nevada hot.  By the time we left the hotel at 10:00, the thermometer was already over 100°.  But we left the hotel anyhow, and set out for Hoover Dam, which we had passed coming in from Arizona the night before.  The highway has been improved a lot since L was here in 2003; it was four lanes all the way back to the dam, and travelers don’t have to drive across the top of the dam any more.  There’s a high bridge over the gorge below the dam.

The first thing we were confronted with was an electric distribution tower that looked about to topple momentarily into the gorge below the dam.  It wasn’t, but it was bolted to the rock face at a vertiginous angle of forty, and made you feel the world was tipping sideways.

Several cable ways were strung for moving vats of concrete across to the work site.  After they were done, one of them was left intact to use for maintenance.  There are still great big things you have to swing out and down to the river.

We got into the parking garage, which was a struggle with Quinn because of all the steep ramps from one level to the next and the crawling cars, and trying not to roll back into the guy crowding up behind me as I let the clutch out.  We finally found a space on the fifth level, parked and went back down to get our tickets.

We had a momentary holdup at the DHS screening station, when the man wanted me to go put my pocket knife back in the car if I didn’t want it confiscated.  I was damned if I was going to hike back up all the stairs I had just come down over a knife, which wasn’t even a very good knife, so I told him he was welcome to it and I’d get another.  That sorted, he let us all through and we went on in to the visitors’ center, watched a video on the construction of the dam, then got herded into an elevator and lowered 500 feet into the center of the dam for a tour of the turbine rooms.

First we got a diagram and a lecture from the docent about the sheer size of everything in the dam.  He told us the room we were standing in was right on top of one of the thirty-foot intake pipes that fed the turbines, and the vibration we felt in the floor was a thirty-foot-wide column of water running through the intakes.  The turbines were also impressive.  We only saw one of the two rooms, the one on the Nevada side.  There’s another just like it on the Arizona side.  Each of the generators puts out twelve million watts of electricity, running at 178,000 horsepower.  “Our” turbine room had eight generators, while the Arizona one had nine.  The California metropolitan water district gets the largest fraction of generated power at 28.5%, and Los Angeles being the largest single customer with 15.4%.

After that we were taken back to the surface, where we went through an exhibit about the dam and could take pictures of the dam, the intake towers, and whatever else.  I felt the most sympathy with a quotation by a wife of one of the dam workers, who obviously hated the place; she said “We came from Illinois where everything was green; there were always enough old vegetables in the fields that you could get by.  Here there’s just nothing but brown and rocks.”

Tour done, we walked down and looked at the memorial to the men who died during the construction of the dam.  Surprisingly, there were relatively few.  Of the estimated 16,000 men who worked on the project during its lifetime, only 96 (some say 115) were killed by accidents.  This doesn’t, of course, count the many who died of “pneumonia” from working in the tunnels—“pneumonia” being what the company doctors were told to call the many cases of carbon monoxide poisoning from the fleets of trucks used in digging the tunnels.  Carbon monoxide poisoning was a compensable on-the-job injury; pneumonia wasn’t.

I tried taking pictures of the dam face, but as with everything else about the place, the sheer height of it all gave me vertigo so it didn’t come out well.  M did somewhat better with her camera.

And that was about all there was to see, so we turned around and drove back to Las Vegas, where L and M went to see Cirque de Soleil’s Mystère and I stayed in the room and read.