Hoover Dam Research Paper

According to the Cobuild Advanced Learning Dictionary, a dam is defined as, A wall that is built across a river in order to stop the water flowing and to make a lake.” The Hoover Dam is located in the Colorado River between Arizona and Nevada. It was first called the Boulder Dam but was later named the Hoover Dam. It was named after President Herbert Hoover. Hoover was not only the president but also an engineer, and when he was Secretary of Commerce (before being President) he urged the construction of the dam. The dam is 726 feet tall and is about 1200 feet wide. The Hoover Dam was startied to be built in March of 1931. According to the official Bureau of Reclamation for the Hoover Dam, the dam is, “A concrete arch-gravity type

This money was used for various parts of the construction. This included houses for the workers in Boulder City. These houses were 7.6 miles away from what was once the construction site of the dam. The money was also used for the materials used in the dam. These included 5 million barrels of cement, 45 million pounds of steel, 6.6 million tons of concrete, 5 20 ton cables (about 200,000 pounds), dynamite, and 600 miles of pipe. If the Hoover Dam were built today with all of these materials, it would cost about 860 million

How It Was Built There were many steps to building the Hoover Dam. The first step was to blast the canyon walls of the Black Canyon. The blasting of the canyon walls helped make four diversion tunnels to move the constant flow of the Colorado’s River water around where the workers were constructing the dam. There were two tunnels made on each side of the canyon. When it was summer the tunnels would be very, very hot (about 140, but in the winter the tunnels would be the exact opposite. When the canyon walls were blasted, the extra rock was then used to make a different route for the Colorado River. After blasting the walls and clearing the rock, workers would then clear the walls of the Black Canyon. During the clearing of the walls, the workers carried 44 pound jackhammers to get rid of the unstable rock. Workers hung to heights of 800 feet to do this treacherous task. The dam base also had to be built. The men had to dig half a million cubic yards to reach the bedrock which was 40 feet below. Concrete was poured into the base. It took 2 years of pouring concrete to