Cadillac Desert (24 page)

In 1928, after six years of paralysis, Congress took matters into its own hands. It authorized Boulder Dam and the All-American Canal on the condition that at least six of the seven states ratify the compact, and that California limit its annual diversion to 4.4 million acre-feet per year. That implied only 2.8 million for Arizona (Nevada got 300,000 acre-feet), which was less than it wanted. Arizona, as a result, became the one state that refused to ratify, an act of defiance that would muddle things for another thirty-five years. At the time, however, its vote wasn’t needed, and the other states’ ratification led forthwith to the California Limitation Act and, subsequently, to passage of the Boulder Canyon Project Act. All of this appeared to settle matters: the basin could now embark on an orgy of growth the likes of which the West had never seen. And it did settle things, temporarily at least, except for one small matter: the average annual flow of the Colorado River was nowhere near 17.5 million acre-feet.

In 1930, the American West had a population of eleven million people, about the population of New York State. Half of the people were in California, by far the most populous and modern of the western states. When Californians traveled, however, they went mainly on dirt roads. The drive from San Francisco to Lake Tahoe, which is now done in three or four hours, was a two-day adventure or ordeal, depending on one’s point of view. The city’s great bridges had not yet been built. San Jose was not yet a city of thirty thousand, Silicon Valley a strong-hold of orchards and roaming mountain lions. In some of the other states, the usual means of locomotion was still a horse and wagon. Electricity and telephones were unknown in most rural communities, and didn’t reach the more remote ones until the 1950s. In the midst of this same depopulated, untrammeled region, however, the engineering wonder of all time was about to rise.

In Oakland, California, an egomaniacal small-time construction tycoon named Henry J. Kaiser had followed the passage of the Boulder Canyon Project Act with consuming interest. Obsessed with his niche in history, Kaiser was still enough of a realist to know that he could not begin to build such a dam alone. So he called up his friend W. A. Bechtel to ask if he was interested in making a joint bid. Dad Bechtel was a horse-drawn Fresno-scraper kind of contractor; most of his business was road paving, his most noteworthy innovation a folding toothbrush which he carried on trips. Outside of northern California, and even there, the Bechtel Corporation was all but unknown. “I don’t know, Henry” was Bechtel’s response when Kaiser, flushed with excitement, got him on the phone. “It sounds a little ambitious to me.”

A thousand miles away in Utah, two sheep-ranching Mormon brothers named W. H. and E. O. Wattis were as captivated by the Boulder Canyon Project as Kaiser, and just as unable to undertake it themselves. The Wattises’ other business, the Utah Construction Company, specialized in something as mundane as Bechtel’s paving contracts : laying railroad bed. Lately, however, they had taken on a new partner, a maverick Mormon banker with Keynesian leanings who talked about deficit financing while candidate Franklin Roosevelt was still promising a balanced budget. His name was Marriner Eccles, and the reward he was about to receive for his ideological flexibility was an influential position on the Federal Reserve Board. The Wattises had also been in contact with Harry Morrison and Morris Knudsen, two engineers formerly with the Bureau of Reclamation who had gone into business together in Boise, Idaho. And they had spoken with Frank Crowe, another former Bureau engineer whose enthusiasm for Boulder Dam was as obsessive as Kaiser’s. Morrison had just returned from a trip east, where he had tried to influence the financial community to back a bid on the dam. He was told by the western bankers that there wasn’t a company west of the Mississippi they would trust to take on something like this. But one thing would lead to another. Before long, the Wattises were talking with Bechtel and Kaiser, and Henry and Dad were in touch with some other firms—J. F. Shea Construction of Los Angeles, McDonald and Kahn of San Francisco, General Construction of Seattle. In February of 1931, during a meeting at the Engineers Club in San Francisco, the first of the West’s supercompanies was born. There were eight firms altogether, but Kaiser couldn’t resist borrowing a name from the tribunal before which the tongs, the Chinese equivalent of the Mafia families, took their grievances. At his insistence, the executives agreed to call their joint venture Six Companies, Inc. Hocking everything but their shirts, they could barely scrape together the few million dollars they would need to buy enough equipment to begin the job. When the Bureau auctioned off the job, however, it was Six Companies’ amazingly low bid, in the amount of $48,890,995.50, that won. Once again, sang the Los Angeles
Times,
the West had “laughed at logic and driven [its] destiny over obstacles that rational minds deemed insuperable.”

The first eighteen months of work on Boulder Canyon Dam involved the construction of a new Colorado River. Four diversion tunnels were blasted through the rock of the box canyon, two on the Nevada side and two on the Arizona side, each of them three-quarters of a mile long. Their diameter was spacious enough to accommodate a jumbo jet shorn of its wings—a capacity that was needed mainly as insurance against an errant flood of 200,000 cubic feet per second, or more. The task required the excavation of three and half million tons of rock with enough dynamite to level Toledo. On November 13, 1932, four tremendous explosions blew out the entrances and exits of the two Arizona tunnels. The dust had not yet settled when a caravan of trucks lumbered onto a trestle bridge built downstream from the tunnel entrances and began dumping rocks and earth in the river’s path. Finding itself blockaded, the Colorado slowly roiled and rose in frustration; sensing an escape route, it rode off into the tunnels. In a matter of hours, the river had been lured out of a bed it had occupied since the Grand Canyon was formed.

No sooner was the Colorado flowing through the canyon walls than the crews began replacing the flimsy trestle dam with a far more substantial cofferdam; then, for good measure, they built another below. Made of earth and rock and faced with concrete, the upper cofferdam measured 450 by 750 by 96 feet. Half a century earlier, it would have been the largest dam in the world, but its usefulness was to be measured in months.

When the cofferdams were finished, the engineers turned to the next task—stripping the canyon abutments to expose fresh clean solid rock. Because the dam would rise more than seven hundred feet, there was no crane big enough to do the job; it would have to be done by hand. The four hundred men whose job it was to clean the walls were known as high-scalers. Those who persevered—seven were killed on the job—spent months hanging four or five hundred feet in the air, drilling holes in the rock, inserting dynamite, and praying they would be hauled to safety before it exploded. Because the canyon was so tight, they also had to blast out space for portions of the huge powerhouse, the intake towers, and the penstock headers. Some of the rock amphitheaters they created could have held an orchestra.

Besides the hazards of the construction work (the falling rock, the explosives, electrocution, behemoth machines); besides the hazards of off-hours (fist fights, drunken binges, social diseases from the whores who camped about); besides all this, there was the heat. The low-lying parts of the Colorado and Sonora deserts are the hottest corner of North America, and we are speaking of temperatures in open, ambient air. The Colorado’s box canyon held heat like an oven with the door open about an inch. Workers sometimes sacrificed eggs to see if they would actually fry on a sun-fired rock. The first death from heat prostration occurred a few days after construction began, and so many men collapsed that some of the crews finally forced a shutdown, demanded a pay raise, and ultimately staged a strike. The strike, however, did no good. Next to Boulder City was an encampment of tents and shanties known as Ragtown, where the unemployed waited by the hundreds for someone to give up, be fired, or die. “One of the myths about the Depression,” Arthur Miller, the playwright, once said, “is that it brought everyone closer together. Actually, it just made everyone more voracious.” “They will work under our conditions, or they will not work at all,” proclaimed W. H. Wattis. And they did, at a base pay of $4 per day.

It was in 1933 when the explosive din suddenly stopped and an eerie silence descended on Boulder Canyon. The canyon walls were finally clean, the abutments sculpted, the cofferdams in place. Nearly three years after work had begun, the dam was still a figment of the imagination. Now it was time to dig down to bedrock.

The bed of the Mississippi River is hundreds, even thousands, of feet deep in silt. The Columbia and the Missouri flow over alluvial wash as thick as Arctic glaciers. On the Colorado, however, to everyone’s amazement, bedrock was struck at forty feet. A milled piece of sawtimber was found resting at the bottom of the muck, obviously of very recent origin. Since white men had begun to settle the region, perhaps eighty years before, a huge flood had evidently washed the entire channel clean. No one seemed bothered by the certainty that all of the silt constantly being relocated along the entire 1,450-mile length of the river would be forever imprisoned behind Hoover and the other dams soon to be built.

In June of 1933, the foundation was finally ready, and the first of the wooden forms that would be used to lay concrete was being built. The concrete—sixty-six million tons of it—created one of the most vexing problems the engineers had faced, a problem peculiar to large dams. The dam’s size and weight would generate superpressures and insulating mass that would both generate and retain heat. Though the dam would appear solid, it would be, in reality, a pyramid of warm pudding. Left to its own devices, Boulder Dam would require 100 years to cool down. Moreover, the cooling would be uneven, and the resultant shrinkage and warping would leave the structure fissured and cracked. After weeks of wondering what to do, the engineers finally agreed on a solution. As each form was poured, one-inch pipe would be laid through it at five-foot intervals; frigid water from a cooling plant would then be run through the pipes until convection cooling had lowered the temperature of the concrete to forty-three degrees near the base and seventy-two degrees near the crest. Since the amount of pipe required, if it had been laid out in a straight line, would have reached to Big Sur on the central California coast, this was no mean refrigeration plant. Converted to ice-making, it could have chilled a couple of million cocktails a day. Instead, it reduced a century of cooling time to something like twenty months.

When visitors were led to the canyon rim to watch Boulder Dam on the rise, there was usually a long moment of silence, a moment when the visitors groped for something appropriate to say, something that expressed proper awe and reverence for the dazzling, half-formed monstrosity they saw. The dam defied description; it defied belief. Standing on the upstream side of it, two on each flank, were the intake towers, marvelous fluted concrete columns rising 395 feet from platforms that had been blasted halfway up the canyon walls. The towers were as high as forty-story buildings, and someone who had never been to New York or Chicago or Philadelphia would never have seen a man-made stucture that high. But the crest of the dam rose nearly to the tops of the towers, and its foundation was
hundreds of feet
below their base. Its seamless curve swept across the canyon and imbedded itself in each side, a gigantic but somehow graceful intrusion. The men working on top were not even ants; they hardly qualified as fleas. Stretching overhead, from canyon rim to canyon rim, was a thick cable on which hung suspended a sixteen-ton bucket that lowered fresh concrete into the forms. Although it was big enough to accommodate a Buick, the bucket seemed incapable of ever filling the dimensions of Hoover Dam—the name it was ultimately to acquire. But twenty-four hours per day, 220 cubic yards an hour, it did. After two years of pouring, the dam was finally topped out. On March 23, 1935, it stood 726 feet and 5 inches tall.

When the engineers surveyed what they had built, it seemed impossible to believe that anything so immense could fail to hold back the Colorado River under every conceivable circumstance. Between 1907 and 1917, however, the wettest period on record, the river had discharged nearly enough water to fill the reservoir during several years: twenty-four million acre-feet; twelve million; twenty-five and a half million; fourteen million; twenty million; nineteen million; twenty million. Hidden within the figures were big floods, periods when the river flowed at 100,000 or 200,000 cubic feet per second for weeks in a row. If such a flood happened to hit when the reservoir was full, the full force of it would have to be spilled; the penstocks leading to the power plant would never be able to handle it. But 200,000 cfs sent over the top of the dam could erode it like a seawall in a storm. The dam, therefore, required spillways on either side, and to allow for the unforeseen and the incredible they were to be built to handle 400,000 cubic feet per second—nearly twice the Columbia River’s flow. The spillway troughs were excavated on the canyon sides of the intake towers and led into the vast diversion tunnels hollowed through the walls. Like everything else about the dam, they were designed curvilinear and graceful, with immense brass drum gates shaped like diamond heads. Set down in a spillway channel, the
Bismarck
would have floated clear. Some of the project engineers wistfully suggested that turbines be installed at the spillway outlets, even if they operated only during floods. With the penstocks and the outlet works both generating power, the dam, during brief periods, could have electrified the state of California.