The construction of Hoover Dam was so full of innovation (including the invention of the hard hat) and incident that it could fill a book. It also became a popular tourist draw, with spectators thrilling to the sight of the "High Scalers" swinging up, down, and across Black Canyon as they dislodged loose rock. Concrete pouring, scheduled to begin in early 1935, was commenced 18 months ahead of schedule and now-Boulder Dam was considered sufficiently complete for President Franklin Delano Roosevelt to dedicate it on the morning of Sept. 30, 1935. FDR braved 102-degree temperatures and, though the dam would eventually bear the name of his predecessor, Roosevelt made no mention of Herbert Hoover in his remarks. Five months later, the dam was formally handed over to the federal government.
(The dam actually began life, in 1930, as "Hoover Dam." It was renamed "Boulder Dam" at the inception of the Roosevelt administration, even though it had several times been referenced in appropriations bills as "Hoover Dam." Just to made good and sure, during the Truman administration Congress passed legislation in 1947 expressly naming the edifice "Hoover Dam," settling the question in perpetuity. The attribution of the project to Herbert Hoover galled Roosevelt's Secretary of the Interior, Harold Ickes, no end. The true father of the dam is [not very] arguably Bureau of Reclamation Director Arthur Powell Davis, who pitched the Black Canyon site to Congress in 1922.)
By that point, Boulder Dam had claimed 146 lives, beginning with a surveyor in 1922, and including 42 cases of what Six Companies claimed was pneumonia but which workers blamed on carbon-monoxide poisoning contracted from working with motor vehicles boring the diversion tunnels which kept the Colorado River from inundating the construction site.
The Art Deco style which has ensured the dam's status as a tourist attraction and historic site was actually a New Deal afterthought, supplanting the original, Gothic architecture with something more in keeping with the times. The critical figures in this redesign were architect Gordon B. Kaufmann, sculptor Oskar J.W. Hansen, and artist Allen Tupper True (who had the idea of color-coding the pipes and machinery, a scheme soon adopted for other Bureau of Reclamation projects, three of which True decorated). "They died to make the desert bloom," reads the inscription on one of Hansen's sculptures, a memorial to the workers killed during construction. But most of True's artwork cannot be seen by the public anymore, due to post-9/11 security concerns.
Construction of Boulder Dam would continue until 1961. Some of it was top-secret work done to fill corner-cutting done in the grouting process. More overtly, generators kept being added until the dam reached a total of 17. Ironically, although Arizona and Nevada flank the dam, they are only its third- and second-largest customers, with the plurality of the water allocated to the Metropolitan Water District of Southern California. Falling water levels on Lake Mead and the impending Hoover Dam Power Allocation Act will change the distribution somewhat. Already the Southern Nevada Water Authority has dug a third intake (or "straw") into Lake Mead, to ensure that Las Vegas can still sip from the dwindling lake water. The last time the water in Lake Mead was so high as to require opening the dam's spillways was in 1983.
Lake Mead is currently at its lowest level ever. If it doesn't rise a foot or two by year's end, the federal government is empowered to intervene and ration the water allocations to Nevada and Arizona. California and Mexico would be exempt from the belt-tightening, which hardly seems fair to us but that's politics.
