The timing simply couldn’t have been better, because just six months after the approval was given the stock market crashed and the Great Depression swept across the land. Unemployment rocketed to 25 per cent and as a result there was no trouble at all finding men willing to work on what was almost certainly the most barbaric engineering feat of the twentieth century.
The site chosen for the dam was in Boulder Canyon, which was a barren piece of nowhere. Las Vegas, built by workers on the transcontinental railway line, was a two-bit whorehouse with a few bars, and anyway it was twenty miles away.
As work began and men began to flood in with their families, a tented village sprang up on the banks of the river. They called it Ragtown and it was horrific. No public order, no sanitation, no respite from the fierce summer heat and no running water. Still, life in the camp was five-star luxury compared to life on the dam site.
First of all, the river had to be temporarily diverted so the dam could be built. That meant four giant tunnels, each 56 feet in diameter and three-quarters of a mile long, had to be blasted through the 700-foot-high walls of the canyon. The air inside these tunnels was a mix of dust from the explosions and fumes from the trucks that took the waste away.
As the men began to collapse and die, many tried to pressurise the company building the dam to use electric vehicles instead, but the company knew they had everyone over a barrel. Complain and you lost your job. And you weren’t going to get another.
Only when the workforce was told their $5-a-day wages were to be cut was there a strike. But it was over in days.
As the tunnels were being built, other men were sent over the edge of the canyon to prepare the cliff faces for the dam. These guys were known as ‘high scalers’ and they spent their days dangling on ropes, blasting stubborn bits of rock with dynamite and chiselling the easier parts.
Some died when rocks from above fell on their heads. Some died when they fell onto the rocks below. But despite this, everyone kept working and going home to Ragtown at night. Because there was no option.
Time was of the essence. The company had to get the river flowing through the tunnels by the winter of 1932, when the water was low. Or they’d be stuck for a whole year. And if they hadn’t completed the bypass system by October 1933, they’d be facing penalties of $3,000 a day.
The pace of work was therefore furious. Site boss Frank Crowe drove his men so hard that if a man died, he was simply left. ‘He can’t do any harm now,’ the foremen would say, as the endless stream of machinery and men trundled by. Trucks carrying rocks blasted from the tunnels were made to reverse down narrow canyon roads so they didn’t have to waste time turning round at the top. Drivers developed the art of backing up with the door open, so they could jump if the truck toppled over the side. It was worse than hell out there.
And the summer of 1931 was the hottest on record. Even at the camp women and children were dying of heat exhaustion. At the site it was 130 degrees, and it was not unusual for the workers’ body temperatures to rise to 110 degrees.
And then the river decided to show everyone who was boss. It had been meandering past the site for months, but almost as though it sensed what was being done it girded its loins and went berserk.
After the water had receded the entire site was covered in a thick layer of silt and mud. So Crowe made everyone work even harder and even faster to get back on schedule. And he made it. On time, a 750-foot-wide temporary dam was made, forcing the river into his new tunnels and, for the first time in millions of years, the floor of the Boulder Canyon was dry. Work on the main dam could begin.
Now you might think that this would be simple. You’d just need a lot of concrete. But unfortunately, when concrete sets there’s a chemical reaction within it that generates heat. So if it were to be poured into the canyon in one continuous stream, engineers figured, the dam would take 120 years to cool down.
It was therefore made in blocks 60 feet by 5, all interlaced, until on 1 February 1935 there it was; 726 feet high, 660 feet thick at the base and more than 1,200 feet across, easily the largest dam in the world. And it had been built in one of the most inhospitable places on earth, in five years, for less than $50 million. The electricity made there today generates that much cash every three months.
The temporary dam was removed, and the Colorado once again tried to resume its normal course. But the wall held it back, and back, and back. It rose, drowning Ragtown, the tented village, to become a reservoir that sits now like a massive blue splodge on the borders of Nevada and Arizona. It’s called Lake Mead and it contains enough water to drown the state of Pennsylvania to a depth of a foot. There are 9.2 trillion gallons sitting there, waiting to be sucked through the dam’s intake pipes, past the turbines and turned into power we can actually use.
It was one of these intake pipes that claimed the Hoover’s final victim. On 20 December 1935 Patrick Tierney fell inside and died… exactly thirteen years after the first accident at the site claimed the life of his father.
Today there are other dams on the Colorado, and other reservoirs. And so great is the evaporation from these giant inland seas that by the time the Colorado reaches the coast in Mexico it’s just a saline trickle. It hasn’t just been beaten. Thanks to America’s insatiable appetite for everything it’s been killed.
Elsewhere in the US and the rest of the world there are other dams that dwarf the Hoover. But for me, it’s still the most special, partly because of the 107 men who died making it and partly because of where it is.
There’s something strangely odd about a straight, man-made edge in this barren and craggy terrain. It’s as out of place as a footprint on the moon or the rusting hulk of the Titanic on the seabed. It shouldn’t belong, and yet, somehow, it does.
I love it too for what it has created. Quite simply, without the Hoover Dam there would be no Las Vegas and no Phoenix. Without manageable water supplies and electricity these places could never have become the sprawling cities that they are today.
It’s clean electricity too. To produce the 2,000 megawatts that comes out of the huge white wall every year would normally take 10,000 barrels of oil. And, of course, with oil you don’t produce enough water as a by-product for 18 million people.
But the best thing about the Hoover Dam is the way it looks. With its art deco intake towers and that preposterous slope, which seems to accentuate the height when you stand on the top, it is every bit as beautiful as the canyon in which it sits. And that, believe me, is saying something.
It’s regarded now as one of the prime terrorist targets in the world and as a result all commercial traffic and any bus carrying luggage is banned from driving over it. There’s a fear that if it were to be destroyed, it would take a huge chunk of western America with it.
That would be sad, I’m sure. But not as sad as losing the dam. That would be unbearable.
Aircraft Carrier
It’s a ship, first and foremost. But it’s also a nuclear power station. And it’s an airport. And it’s an instrument of war. And above all this, it’s a city with shops, cinemas, hairdressers, banks, hospitals, its own television station, its own daily newspaper and 5,000 inhabitants.
Think about that. Would they put a nuclear reactor in the middle of a city? And would they let fighter jets land on the roof, when the whole thing is pitching and rolling in 50-foot seas? Because that’s what happens on an aircraft carrier. They land F-14s and F-18s, which may be carrying nuclear weapons, on a nuclear power station in bad weather. Dangerous? Oh yes, which is why, when an invitation came to spend a couple of days on board the USS Dwight D. Eisenhower, I was off like a scalded rabbit.
Of course I imagined that I’d be landing in one of those F-14s, but no. They loaded me onto a propeller-driven cargo plane – they call it a Cod but it looks more like a toaster – and flew me out into the middle of the Atlantic to rendezvous with the mighty Nimitz Class carrier.
From the air it doesn’t look mighty at all. In that vast grey ocean un
der a featureless grey sky it looks like a playing card. I know runways. I spend my life tearing up and down them in fast cars. So I know how long they have to be, and the one on top of the Eisenhower wasn’t long enough. Not by a long way.
Here’s what I knew was going to happen. We’d land, fail to stop, fall off the front and then the huge ship would run over the plane, turning it over and over until it, me and everyone else on board was minced by one of the three nuclear-powered, five-bladed propellers, each of which is 21 feet in diameter.
The closest I’d come to dying until this point was in a thunderstorm over Cuba. The Russian plane, which had been made in the fifties and used by the Angolan Air Force until it arrived in Cuba, was barely capable of flight in good conditions. But in a tropical storm it was quite literally upside down. And I remember thinking, ‘Well, at least the kids can say that Dad went west in a Soviet fighter in the Caribbean.’ It’d look good in the obituaries as well.
The impending landing on the Eisenhower was stirring up those memories. ‘Yup, Dad died when he was liquidised by an aircraft carrier.’ It had a ring.
As we descended the ship grew larger and larger in the plane’s window, but it was still nowhere near large enough when we touched down, hooked up the arrester wire and went from 120 to zero mph in 0.0000000008 of a second.
Interestingly, my spleen, heart, lungs and liver continued to do 120 until they slammed into my ribcage whereupon they bounced back into place. Happily, you don’t feel this because you’re busy feeling around under the seat in front for both your eyeballs.
Moments later I was unbuckled and led onto the flight deck, where the jets did their best to blast me over the side and into the oggin. They say that working on the flight deck of a carrier is the most dangerous job in the world. I don’t know about that but I can testify that it’s certainly the noisiest.
And one of the least well organised. You’d imagine in a modern carrier that all of the flight operations would be computerised but, in fact, each of the planes is represented in air traffic control by a lump of wood which is pushed around a board by a man with no high-school qualifications. And this was the most high-tech thing I was to see for two days.
I was shown to my quarters, which were more like sixteenths. There was a bed that was one foot shorter than me and steel walls, a steel ceiling and a steel floor. There was no window, but then there is no window in any room on a carrier. You go on board and for months you have no idea whether it’s day or night.
Certainly, the flight operations give no clue. I got no sleep at all on the first night, partly because it turned out my bed was steel too and partly because I seemed to have been given a room right underneath the steam catapult, which went off every twenty minutes or so.
And in between each firing an American came over the ship’s PA system to announce at the top of his substantial, sergeant-major voice something important like: ‘The donut-vending machine on Deck B is now fully functional. We would like to thank the brave men and women of the USS Dwight D. Eisenhower who have worked so tirelessly to repair this invaluable equipment.’
In fact it turned out my room was nowhere near the steam catapult. I know this because the following morning I went to look at it and it took nigh on half an hour to get there. Then it took a further 90 minutes to get to the arrester-wire control room.
This was amazing. I just thought the wire was a piece of elastic but it’s a steel cable that’s connected to a hydraulic jack. And before a plane can land, someone on the flight deck has to telephone the man in the arrester-wire room to tell him what sort it is.
A big heavy F-14 needs a different setting than a Cod, for instance. Seems sensible, except for two things. First of all, the arrester-wire room is the noisiest place on earth – you couldn’t even hear the million-watt PA system in there – leave alone what someone at the other end of a phone was saying. And secondly, the man who had to set the machine was easily the stupidest person I’d ever met.
Had I known when I was coming in to land in the Cod that my life was in the hands of a man who could neither hear nor string two words together, I’d have jumped.
I asked him a few questions. A few of his spots burst. And I set off on a brief two-hour walk to find the admiral. At one point I thought I recognised one of the corridors. It seemed to be a slightly less-dark shade of grey, but actually my perception was ebbing, along with my will to live.
Life on the bridge was much better. It has windows from which you can see the flotilla a carrier needs when it’s at sea. There’s the fuel tanker, for the planes stoopid (the Eisenhower has enough juice in its reactors to last a million miles). And then there’s the food ship, which, being American, was huge. The Eisenhower’s crew get through 18,000 meals a day, which means they need 5,000 gallons of milk a week and, in a typical cruise, 160,000 eggs.
That’s before you start to feed the crews on the smaller warships that tag along to protect the big daddy (and the food ship) from a waterborne assault, and the sub, to protect it from beneath. There were fourteen ships out there, all to take care of the carrier.
And yet, should the balloon go up, the Eisenhower would leave its escorts far behind. A good modern warship can thunder along at 28 or 29 knots. But a Nimitz Class carrier will hammer along at 33. It is, according to the admiral, the racing car of the seas.
But it’s the size of these extraordinary ships that boggles the mind most of all. Of course, there are longer oil tankers plodding around the seaways, but in terms of sheer bulk the Nimitz Class carriers are right out in a class of their own. They weigh as near as makes no difference 100,000 tons. Their turbines produce 280,000 horsepower. And the nuclear power on board allows continuous operation for fifteen years. To power a normal carrier for that long would take 11 billion barrels of fuel oil.
And now we’re starting to get into the serious statistics that arouse the hairs on the back of your neck. The Eisenhower is as tall as a 24-storey building, she can carry up to 90 planes and she costs £300 million a year to run. Mind you, that’s small fry compared to the £3 BILLION she cost to build. And remember, America has twelve of these monsters.
The idea behind them is very simple. They turn up off the enemy coast and Johnny Foreigner is so cowed by their enormity he lays down his assault rifle and opens a shop. Quite how that’ll work when the latest big carrier takes to the seas, I don’t know. You see, it’s called the USS Ronald Reagan.
Whatever, the Eisenhower was certainly scary. Not because of the nukes it can rain down on your hometown but because I’d gone to the loo and was lost. I asked for directions many times, but it turned out the man in the arrester-wire room had been given the Big Job because he was the brightest man on board. Most didn’t seem to have heard of the bridge or the admiral and they certainly didn’t know where he or it might be.
Then they sounded general quarters, which is a bit like the teacher turning round. Everyone with a proper job must rush to battle stations and everyone in an ancillary capacity has to stay wherever they are, behind locked-down bulkheads. I was in a steel room with a steel floor and a steel ceiling. It could have been my bedroom. But because I fell asleep in there, it seemed unlikely.
Eventually, when the two-hour general quarters was over, a search party found me and from that point on I was given a minder. I forget his name but I do recall that he looked like Barney Rubble, and he really was the daftest man on board.
‘Attention!’ screamed the intercom, and I immediately put my fingers in my ears, assuming another donut machine had been mended. But no. It turned out an F-14 was on its final approach… and one of its engines was on fire.
‘Quick,’ I said to Barney. ‘We must get up to the Vulture’s Nest so that my crew can film the fighter pilot nursing his stricken plane onto the deck.’
Barney agreed but seemed more bothered about getting our room account settled. Amazingly, visitors to the carrier are charged $8 a night. ‘Here,’ I said, plunging a ten into his podgy hands. But it was no go
od. Barney needed to give me change but didn’t have any. ‘OK,’ I yelled. ‘Here’s a fifty. That’ll cover all of us.’ And turned to run.
Barney wasn’t sure. So he pulled out a pencil and started to do some sums. ‘Let’s see,’ he mumbled to himself, ‘eight dollars a room and there are six of them. That’s six times eight which is, er, um…’ Pretty soon he ran out of fingers so he assembled a selection of alternatives before working out, after a full ten minutes, that the answer was 48.
‘Well,’ he said with a smile. ‘We’re no further on. I still owe you two dollars and I still don’t have any change.’ He wouldn’t keep it and as a result we missed the spectacle of a mono-engined F-14 thudding onto the carrier’s deck. Thanks, Barney. ‘Don’t mention it,’ he said cheerily.
And then it was time to go home. We were loaded back into the toaster and, to my enormous surprise, wheeled right to the front of the ship, giving us no runway at all to use for the take-off. We’d simply be attached to the steam catapult, which would fling us off the end, after which we’d fall into the sea and be minced by the props.
We were told not to worry by the grinning Barney, who said the steam catapult could fire a VW Beetle seventeen miles. So it’d have no problem with our little Cod, especially as the ship points into wind for every take-off. Every little detail of the launch procedure was discussed in fact… except one.
I know you got soul: machines with that certain something Page 10