- Hiltzik, Michael.
Colossus.
New York: Free Press, 2010.
ISBN 978-1-4165-3216-3.
-
This book, subtitled “Hoover Dam and the Making of
the American Century” chronicles the protracted, tangled,
and often ugly history which led up to the undertaking,
in the depths of the Great Depression, of the largest single
civil engineering project ever attempted in the world up to that
time, its achievement ahead of schedule and only modestly above
budget, and its consequences for the Colorado River basin and
the American West, which it continues to profoundly influence
to this day.
Ever since the 19th century, visionaries, ambitious politicians,
builders and engineers, and more than a few crackpots and confidence
men had dreamt of and promoted grand schemes to harness the
wild rivers of the American southwest, using their water to make
the barren deserts bloom and opening up a new internal frontier
for agriculture and (with cheap hydroelectric power) industry.
Some of the schemes, and their consequences, were breathtaking.
Consider the
Alamo Canal,
dug in 1900 to divert water from the Colorado River to irrigate
the Imperial Valley of California. In 1905, the canal, already
silted up by the water of the Colorado, overflowed, creating
a flood which submerged more than five hundred square miles of
lowlands in southern California, creating the
Salton Sea, which is
still there today (albeit smaller, due to evaporation and lack of
inflow). Just imagine how such an environmental disaster would be
covered by the legacy media today. President Theodore Roosevelt,
considered a champion of the environment and the West, declined to
provide federal assistance to deal with the disaster, leaving it
up to the Southern Pacific Railroad, who had just acquired title to
the canal, to, as the man said, “plug the hole”.
Clearly, the challenges posed by the notoriously fickle Colorado
River, known for extreme floods, heavy silt, and a tendency to jump
its banks and establish new watercourses, would require a much more
comprehensive and ambitious solution. Further, such a solution would
require the assent of the seven states within the river basin:
Arizona, California, Colorado, Nevada, New Mexico, Utah, and Wyoming,
among the sparsely populated majority of which there was deep distrust that
California would exploit the project to loot them of their water for
its own purposes. Given the invariant nature of California politicians
and subsequent events, such suspicion was entirely merited.
In the 1920s, an extensive sequence of negotiations and court decisions
led to the adoption of a compact between the states (actually, under its
terms, only six states had to approve it, and Arizona did not until 1944).
Commerce Secretary Herbert Hoover played a major part in these negotiations,
although other participants dispute that his rôle was as central
as he claimed in his memoirs. In December 1928, President Coolidge signed a
bill authorising construction of the dam and a canal to route water downstream,
and Congress appropriated US$165 million for the project, the largest
single federal appropriation in the nation's history to that point.
What was proposed gave pause even to the master builders who came forward
to bid on the project: an arch-gravity dam 221 metres high, 379 metres
long, and 200 metres wide at its base. Its construction would require
3.25 million cubic yards (2.48 million cubic metres) of concrete, and would
be, by a wide margin, the largest single structure ever built by the
human species. The dam would create a reservoir containing 35.2 cubic
kilometres of water, with a surface area of 640 square kilometres. These
kinds of numbers had to bring a sense of “failure is not an option”
even to the devil-may-care roughneck engineers of the epoch. Because, if
for no other reason, they had a recent example of how the devil might
care in the absence of scrupulous attention to detail. Just months before
the great Colorado River dam was approved, the
St. Francis Dam
in California, built with the same design proposed for the new dam,
suddenly failed catastrophically, killing more than 600 people downstream.
William Mulholland, an enthusiastic supporter of the Colorado dam, had
pronounced the St. Francis dam safe just hours before it failed. The St. Francis
dam collapse was the worst civil engineering failure in American history
and arguably remains so to date. The consequences of a comparable
failure of the new dam were essentially unthinkable.
The contract for construction was won by a consortium of engineering
firms called the “Six Companies” including names which
would be celebrated in twentieth century civil engineering including
Kaiser, Bechtel, and Morrison-Knudsen. Work began in 1931, as the Depression
tightened its grip upon the economy and the realisation sank in that
a near-term recovery was unlikely to occur. With this project one of the
few enterprises hiring, a migration toward the job site began, and the
labour market was entirely tilted toward the contractors. Living and
working conditions at the outset were horrific, and although the former
were eventually ameliorated once the company town of Boulder City was
constructed, the rate of job-related deaths and injuries remained higher
than those of comparable projects throughout the entire construction.
Everything was on a scale which dwarfed the experience of earlier projects.
If the concrete for the dam had been poured as one monolithic block, it
would have taken more than a century to cure, and the heat released in the
process would have caused it to fracture into rubble. So the dam was built
of more than thirty thousand blocks of concrete, each about fifty feet square
and five feet high, cooled as it cured by chilled water from a refrigeration
plant running through more than six hundred miles of cooling pipes embedded
in the blocks. These blocks were then cemented into the structure of the
dam with grout injected between the interlocking edges of adjacent blocks. And
this entire structure had to be engineered to last forever and
never fail.
At the ceremony marking the start of construction, Secretary of the Interior
Ray Wilbur surprised the audience by referring to the project as
“Hoover Dam”—the first time a comparable project had
been named after a sitting president, which many thought unseemly,
notwithstanding Hoover's involvement in the interstate compact behind
the project. After Hoover's defeat by Roosevelt in 1932, the new administration
consistently referred to the project as “Boulder Dam” and
so commemorated it in a stamp issued on the occasion of the dam's
dedication in September 1935. This was a bit curious as well, since the
dam was actually built in Black Canyon, since the geological foundations in
Boulder Canyon had been found unsuitable to anchor the structure. For
years thereafter, Democrats called it “Boulder Dam”,
while Republican stalwarts insisted on “Hoover Dam”. In 1947,
newly-elected Republican majorities in the U.S. congress passed a bill
officially naming the structure after Hoover and, signed by President Truman, so it
has remained ever since.
This book provides an engaging immersion in a very different age, in
which economic depression was tempered by an unshakable confidence
in the future and the benefits to flow from continental scale
collective projects, guided by wise men in Washington and carried
out by roughnecks risking their lives in the savage environment
of the West. The author discusses whether such a project could
be accomplished today and concludes that it probably couldn't. (Of
course, since all of the rivers with such potential for irrigation
and power generation have already been dammed, the question is
largely moot, but is relevant for grand scale projects such as solar
power satellites, ocean thermal energy conversion, and other
engineering works of comparable transformative consequences on
the present-day economy.) We have woven such a web of environmental
constraints, causes for litigation, and a tottering tower of debt that
it is likely that a project such as Hoover Dam, without which the
present-day U.S. southwest would not exist in its present form, could
never have been carried out today, and certainly not before its scheduled
completion date. Those who regard such grand earthworks as hubristic
folly (to which the author tips his hat in the final chapters) might
well reflect that history records the achievements of those who
have grand dreams and bring them into existence, not those who
sputter out their lives in courtrooms or trading floors.
December 2010 