Today in History: Hoover Dam is completed

On this day 80 years ago, a crowd of 20,000 people gathered in Nevada to watch President Franklin Delano Roosevelt commemorate the completion of the Hoover Dam.

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The idea for a multipurpose dam had been in motion since the early 20th century, but was not approved by Congress until 1928. The Boulder Canyon Project outlined a dam built in Black Canyon on the border of Nevada and Arizona.

With people concerned over the $165 million price tag for the project, it was decided that the dam would control floods, provide irrigation water and produce and sell hydroelectric power to recover its costs.

Secretary of Commerce (and soon-to-be president) Herbert Hoover brokered the controversial deal in 1922, but due to legal finagling, it was not authorized until outgoing president Calvin Coolidge signed off on the Boulder Canyon Project in 1928. It was announced that because of Hoover's passion towards the project, the dam would be named after him.

As construction began in 1931, so did the Great Depression. Workers flocked to Boulder City for a chance to work on the project.

The work that ensued was toiling and treacherous, with thousands of crews burning the midnight oil under dangerous conditions that included working in carbon monoxide-choked tunnels and dangling from hundreds of feet high in canyon walls.

The tight time frame caused even more friction and peril and by the time the project was finished in 1936, over 100 workers had died in the process.

The Hoover Dam was the largest dam and reservoir in the world at the time of completion. Although it has since been replaced by multiple others, the national landmark is still home to more than one million tourists a year and its reservoir stores enough water in Lake Mead to irrigate two million acres of land.


See some photos from the construction of the Hoover Dam below:

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