Unreal City: Las Vegas, Black Mesa, and the Fate of the West

by Nies, Judith

  In the 1932 election the economic depths of the Depression and the skillful campaign run by Franklin Delano Roosevelt defeated Herbert Hoover. President Roosevelt’s new secretary of interior, Harold Ickes, investigated the workers’ complaints at Hoover Dam, and, since it was a federally funded project, he filed more than a thousand labor violations against Six Companies. In 1933 Warren Bechtel quickly dispatched Henry Kaiser to Washington to launch a public relations campaign and to lobby Congress to keep funds flowing. At the time many congressmen argued that in the midst of such devastating economic times—the national unemployment figure was close to 13 million people—the federal government should not be spending money on a dam in the West that would benefit mainly California.

  Kaiser had visited the dam site only once, succumbed to heat prostration, and never went back. In Washington, however, Kaiser was a brilliant and indefatigable public relations man, revealing a genius for working the press and shaping public perception of America’s greatest construction project. Kaiser deserves credit for the popular view of Hoover Dam as a great civic undertaking.

  He quickly made the case that public works projects like Hoover Dam were necessary for providing employment in desperate economic times and that funding for the project should not be cut. Zane Grey, the most popular western novelist of the era, wrote a novel called Boulder Dam; Edmund Wilson, known as America’s preeminent man of letters, went to Las Vegas and wrote a series of articles for the New Republic, describing the towering man-over-nature dimensions of the project. Magazines like Time and Life and Forbes ran repeated stories about the dam’s innovative construction techniques. Henry Kaiser succeeded in turning the construction of the dam—then called Boulder, later renamed Hoover—into one of the great heroic accomplishments of Depression-era America. In the public mind it became an enduring symbol of America’s technological genius and resilient national character. During the economic hard times in the Great Recession of 2008–2013, President Obama was said to be looking for “his Hoover Dam,” an inaccurate metaphor, since Hoover Dam was not a public works project or a great civic undertaking but was built by private companies whose profits are estimated to have been more than $18 million ($307 million in current dollars) in the midst of the Depression. The workers who built it under brutal working conditions did not share in the rewards. This symbolic version of Hoover Dam is largely due to Henry Kaiser’s skills in public relations and media.

  Kaiser used old-fashioned persuasion, and he pioneered modern lobbying techniques. He wooed congressmen and senators at lavish lunches and dinners. He fascinated them with stories of technological innovations like the multilevel drilling platform named the Jumbo from which men drilled the dynamite holes for the fifty-foot-wide diversion tunnels; he showed photographs of bold engineering innovations such as the concrete delivery system and cooling pipes embedded in the concrete and filled with ice water. He went on the radio and depicted the heroism of the “high-scalers,” men hanging like human flies on vertical walls a thousand feet above the canyon floor, pounding rock loose from the walls with pneumatic drills. (One photograph of the high-scalers showed most of them to be Native Americans.) He described the quality and quantity of the food at the famous Anderson mess hall that could feed five thousand men three meals a day. He described the ideal workers’ town being built at Boulder City for twenty-five hundred men and their families. He talked about the school that Six Companies built for the workers’ children and the excellent education they were providing; he praised the courage and morale of the men who worked in stupefying desert heat and explained in layman’s terms the special equipment and drills that had been designed and manufactured especially for dam construction. Long newspaper articles described the concrete plant and the steel reinforcement and the overhead buckets that would pour the concrete. He described the 115-square-mile federal reservation site and how the river was rerouted through diversion tunnels to create a mile-long dam site. He claimed, and he was probably right, that Hoover Dam would be the most significant single structure ever built in America. He went on speaking tours, commissioned a quick book on the dam, talked with reporters, lobbied congressmen, gave a weekly radio show, and asked for the country’s support. He got it.

  At the actual site the government had to send in troops from Utah to keep order. In Washington Secretary Ickes ordered Six Companies to pay its workers in dollars, not scrip; charged them with seven thousand counts of unfair labor practices; and imposed a fine of $350,000. Kaiser’s political efforts got it reduced to $100,000.

  When the dam was finished it was a seamless curve of concrete across the Colorado River, from foundation to crest, higher than the Empire State Building. It was the first dam on any major river in the world. Its actual structure was like a truncated pyramid, 660 feet thick at the base, tapering to 45 feet thick at the top. On either side of the dam the intake towers rose gracefully from platforms that had been blasted halfway up the canyon walls. In describing the construction for the Smithsonian archives, Frank Crowe wrote, “Twelve hundred men with modern equipment had in 32 months built a structure whose volume is greater than the largest pyramid of Egypt, which according to Herodotus required 100,000 men 20 years to complete.” In actual fact closer to ten thousand men worked on the dam over the five years of construction because only a few lasted beyond one summer.

  On September 30, 1935, President Roosevelt traveled to Black Canyon, accompanied by Interior Secretary Ickes and a retinue of reporters, governors, and congressmen from most of the Colorado River basin states. Roosevelt began his address, which was broadcast live over the two major national radio networks, “This morning I came, I saw and I was conquered, as everyone would be who sees for the first time this great feat of mankind.” Even Ickes, who had been Six Companies’ most vocal opponent, was won over by the power of the achievement and recorded in his diary, “It is a marvel of engineering.”

  Hoover Dam did transform the West, but its main beneficiary was California. California got most of the water, the electricity, and the budgeted canals and aqueducts. When John D. Rockefeller Sr., who owned almost 50 percent of almost every mining operation in the West, was asked why he didn’t invest more in western industries or land development in California, he said it was because he didn’t think the western states had enough water or electricity to sustain their own manufacturing base. He saw the West mainly as a source of minerals and energy resources for eastern industry and believed that the western states would always be dependent on the East for its manufactured goods. Until Hoover Dam began operation in 1936, he was right. The dam, its huge reservoir—named Lake Mead after Elmore Mead, the first head of the Bureau of Reclamation—and the accompanying hydroelectric plant provided the western states, but mainly California, with the water and electricity to break free of the East and to develop their own industries. Within thirty years California, by itself, had grown to be the fifth-largest economy in the world and the most populous state in the nation. That could not have happened without the water and power provided by Hoover Dam. Other states such as Arizona and Nevada, with tiny populations, saw that they would need more water and more electricity in order to grow.

  The dam on the Colorado River changed Las Vegas by giving it reliable electricity from the hydroelectric plant and 300,000 acre-feet of water from Lake Mead. At the time Las Vegas didn’t need the water because it still had its own aquifer, but by 1955 it had lowered the groundwater level by 200 feet and started pumping its Colorado River water allocation into the city. Although the dam was accepted by the government in 1935, postconstruction repairs continued until 1947, with the crews staying on in Boulder City and Las Vegas. The bedrock in which the dam was anchored was found to be riddled with fissures and faults through which water was seeping. For the next nine years a repair project went forward from inside the dam in which new rows of boreholes were drilled into the bedrock, one of them 480 feet deep. The project required $2 million and twelve thousand tons of cement. Although seepage began pourin
g into the dam’s galleries and grouting went on for years, this was not public knowledge.

  Tourists came from all over the country to see the dam. By the late 1930s, America’s leaders were preparing for war and commissioning Army Air Force training bases in the Nevada desert around Las Vegas to train a new generation of pilots and soldiers. Bechtel teamed up with Utah Construction and Morrison-Knudsen to get contracts for military construction. During World War II they built military bases in Nevada, Arizona, and California as well as in war zones around the world. The West Coast was the staging area for the Pacific theater of the war and the beginning of a large population shift. Bechtel expanded to new projects (oil refineries, marine ports, pipelines, road systems, airports, tunnels, generating stations), but it also never left Nevada. In 1943 with the beginning of the Manhattan Project, it built storage plants for nuclear materials. When nuclear testing began, it built the “Doomsday Town.” In 1950 it helped construct the Atomic Test Site, located sixty-five miles from Las Vegas. Bechtel-Nevada became a permanent subsidiary. (Today Bechtel is also the manager and operator of the privatized nuclear research labs at Los Alamos in New Mexico and the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California.)

  In today’s Las Vegas, just a few blocks east of the Strip on Flamingo Road, is the Atomic Testing Museum. The museum documents the technical story of nuclear testing at the Nevada Test Site using interactive exhibits, videos, and a theater that replicates the sound and flash of a nuclear blast. A brass plaque in the lobby of the museum lists the founders and major donors. The largest donors all have the name Bechtel in the title:

  •The Bechtel Foundation

  •Bechtel Nevada Corporation

  •Bechtel Science Applications International Corporation

  Even though a line item in the 2012 federal military budget makes the Atomic Testing Museum an affiliate of the Smithsonian, the exhibits barely mention the social or cultural aspects of America’s atomic project—the dangers from testing, the problems with fallout, the cancer levels among “downwinders,” the treatment of Navajo uranium miners, and the thirteen hundred abandoned nuclear mines still blowing radioactive dust on the Navajo reservation.

  Today Bechtel is also manager of the Nevada Test Site for the Department of Energy. With some three thousand employees, the test site is southern Nevada’s largest nongaming employer. Until 2010 it had another large workforce hollowing out Yucca Mountain, also at the edge of the test site, the location that was supposed to become the nation’s national nuclear waste depository. The same day I went to the Mormon Fort I also found the Nevada State Museum and met two men in the lobby who were there for a Bechtel meeting in the museum’s auditorium. They worked for the Yucca Mountain Project, at that time budgeted at $18 billion. Its funding was stopped during the Obama administration because of local opposition and questions similar to the ones that a reporter for Innovation America asked Frederick Tarantino, president of Bechtel-Nevada, in 2004. “How do you reconcile the proximity of projects involving nuclear waste, hazardous materials and rocket launchings so relatively close to what is arguably America’s greatest tourist destination, Las Vegas?”

  His answer was that sixty miles of desert between Las Vegas and the border of the Nevada Test Site was plenty. “There’s a lot of desert between here and there that’s really not developed. There aren’t very many remote places like the Nevada Test Site any longer.” Many people in Las Vegas came to believe that when it came to nuclear materials, sixty miles wasn’t anywhere near remote enough, especially when the spent nuclear fuel rods from 104 nuclear reactors from thirty-one states would be traveling by rail and highway through Las Vegas on their way to Yucca Mountain. Although the state’s political culture is focused on small government and individual self-reliance, some 280,000 federal employees live around Las Vegas.

  In the atomic age, Las Vegas, like America, was on a new path.

  *An acre-foot is 326,000 gallons or the amount of water need to cover a football field (roughly an acre) with a foot of water. One-acre foot is generally calculated as enough water to supply two families for a year.

  CHAPTER 10

  CHINATOWN 2

  In an arid climate water assumes a mystical power. Nothing is possible without water. It is why water is made to seem easily accessible in Las Vegas. Most Las Vegas casino-hotel entrances have fountains spouting jets of water, lit by colored lights, forming shapes of fish and dolphins. Hotel swimming pools are larger than New England ponds. One nightclub is built entirely around a pool. Steve Wynn bought and imploded an entire resort-casino, the Dunes, in order to create the eight-acre mini Lake Como in front of the Bellagio with fountain jets that dance in computerized perfection to Broadway show tunes.* Some of the jets shoot 250 feet in the air. Treasure Island used to have a lake large enough so that two pirate ships could conduct a mock battle every hour on the hour. Golf courses are designed with mini lakes, waterfalls, and greens with water holes. The Venetian has canals with gondoliers rowing guests around a mock St. Mark’s Square. The most famous entertainment in Las Vegas, however, is Cirque du Soleil’s water show, O, as in eau, the French word for water, billed as an “aquatic masterpiece” and staged in a specially built theater and tank. The sensuous qualities of water are heightened in the desert.

  Talk of drought and water shortages is not encouraged. Criticism of water policy issues is limited to reader comments at the end of articles in the Las Vegas Review-Journal and on local cable channels. The theory is that anything that touches on climate change or water limitations will put off the tourist industry. “It was amazing to me when I first got into this job,” said Pat Mulroy, the general manager of the Southern Nevada Water Authority, “how sensitive the tourist market is to water stories in Southern Nevada.” “Water stories” refer to the visibly distressed Lake Mead, the shrinking Colorado River, lack of conservation, the location of a wastewater treatment plant only six miles above the water intake pipe, and the legally binding agreements that relate to the state’s share of the Colorado River’s flow. Although the water authority has been vigilant in promoting a conservation program in which they pay residents to tear up their lawns and replace them with desert plantings, there are still 39 million visitors a year who are taking showers and flushing toilets. No officials are suggesting that anyone tear up the grass on the more than fifty golf courses in Las Vegas. Las Vegas has the highest per capita use of water in the country.

  Although some people still believe that Las Vegas sits on top of a limitless aquifer and that natural springs feed the lush green golf courses, the reality is that Las Vegas’s unallocated groundwater was mostly pumped out by the 1960s. Today, 90 percent of Las Vegas water comes from the three hundred thousand acre-feet allocated from Lake Mead and the ever-diminishing waters of the Colorado River. Pat Mulroy and Las Vegas water planners have already looked to alternative sources and have spent more than a decade formulating new water schemes and buying up water rights in two valleys 200 miles to the north. The plan, which some have dubbed the Grand Scheme, involves running a pipeline at least 200 miles from northern Nevada to Las Vegas.

  The model for Las Vegas’s future water supply took place a century ago in Los Angeles with the construction of the aqueduct that brought water from Owens Valley, 250 miles away, to Los Angeles. Although Roman Polanski’s classic movie Chinatown was based on true events that took place in 1913, the movie placed them in the 1930s—better clothes, better cars—and hit a few of the high points of the collusion between city officials and private landowners, but left out much of the political stealth involved, including federal involvement that reached to Teddy Roosevelt in the White House in 1908. The title Chinatown referred to layers of deception that were so convoluted it was impossible to trace an accurate story line. As Marc Reisner wrote in Cadillac Desert:

  Everything the city did was legal (thought its chief collaborator, the U.S. Forest Service, did indeed violate the law). Whether one can justify what the city did, however, is another s
tory. Los Angeles employed chicanery, subterfuge, spies, bribery, a campaign of divide-and-conquer, and a strategy of lies to get the water it needed. In the end, it milked the valley bone-dry, impoverishing it, while the water made a number of prominent Los Angeleans very, very rich. There are those who would argue that if all of this was legal, then something is the matter with the law.

  It may be legal, but it isn’t moral or sustainable. The more sophisticated concept for today’s new water wars is “legal theft.” From 1908 to 1913, during the five years that Los Angeles was building the 233-mile aqueduct from Owens Valley, Fred Eaton, the mayor of the city, along with Harrison Otis, LA Times publisher Harry Chandler, and a syndicate of friends were buying up lands in the San Fernando Valley in anticipation of future irrigation water from the Owens Valley. When the aqueduct opened in 1913, the first use of Owens Valley water was not for Los Angeles citizens, but for irrigating the new farms of San Fernando Valley and the fortunes of millionaires. Within ten years, by 1924, the Owens Valley Lake had been pumped out. William Mulholland, the chief engineer of the Los Angeles Water and Power Authority, today’s Los Angeles Department of Water and Power (LADWP), began buying up groundwater rights and valley farms in order to drain the Owens River. By 1928 Los Angeles owned 90 percent of the water rights in the valley. The lake disappeared, the river disappeared, vegetation disappeared, and finally Owens Valley had huge alkali flats at the north end where the lake used to be. The entire valley ecosystem had been devastated. The valley produced a poisonous dust named “particulate pollution” that was a toxic mix of fine sand, arsenic, and assorted metals that measured twenty-five times federal health standards. On days with high winds, local emergency rooms filled up with asthmatic children. Winds carried the Owens Valley dust for hundreds of miles, clouding national parks and marring the one hundredth anniversary celebration of the Los Angeles Aqueduct on November 5, 2013. “Wicked dust storms spun through Newall Pass during the centennial celebration of the Los Angeles Aqueduct,” a reporter wrote. “The winds shuddered against the tent that held hundreds of LADWP workers and sent blinding poofs of dirt into the faces of the civic dignitaries seated onstage. It was an ominous sign.”