At first glance, when water comes out of the faucet it seems like a simple act that most are used to. But when traced back from where it originates, especially in the west; there will be miles of pipes, multiple pumps, and a location probably distant from you where the water source is. If you have your own water source such as a well, it still for convenience requires pipes, electric pumps and a machine or man that previously dug that well. But focusing on the majority, this distant place is usually called a reservoir. In the west almost all water is supplied from reservoirs, much electricity is supplied through hydroelectric generators, and they also control flooding which keeps a constant flow year round. To help understand the importance, and the work that these reservoirs require, a study of the Hoover Dam is appropriate.
Reservoirs require damming, some man made and others natural. The Hoover Dam has been around since the mid 1900’s and is still viable. This is why “Preliminary designs were prepared from over a period of ten years” (Dunar and Mcbride, 1993). Once plans were solidified, “pre-construction activities” had to take place prior to actual work on the dam, “including work on building Boulder City to accommodate construction workers, on the railroad spur linking Las Vegas and Black Canyon, to access the site, as well as the communication line” (Kwak, 2014).
A project of this size takes money, a company that merged 6 companies as one gave the lowest bid which was “significantly less than their competition, at $48,890,955” (Kwak, 2014). Seems like a lot of money, but this reservoir was expected to serve “seven Basin states” (Kwak, 2014) including “Arizona, California, Colorado, Nevada, New Mexico, Utah, and Wyoming” (Kwak, 2014), and it lead to “the greatest leap forward in concrete technology ever” (Dolen, 2010). That almost 49 million dollar bid has gone a long way.
Now the focus of this article, how much manpower did the Hoover Dam require? That is hard to estimate while thinking about engineers, politicians, and others involved in the preparation, the ongoing project, and the follow up that lasted over 15 years. Just in construction, the “Hoover Dam project, employ[ed] approximately 5200 people at its peak” (Kwak, 2014). How many came before and after is hard to say, but with “On site deaths … estimated at more than 1000 workers, not including those documented as victims of pneumonia” (Smith, 2011), and “Although workers were well compensated and received housing benefits, it has been well documented that many workers died of carbon monoxide poisoning in tunnels with inadequate ventilation” (Rogers, 2010).Considering these facts and that people are still employed today by the dam, it is a significant chunk.
Sources:
Dolen, Timothy P. “Advances in Mass Concrete Technology-The Hoover Dam Studies.” Hoover Dam, 2010, doi:10.1061/41141(390)5.
Dunar, Andrew J., and Dennis McBride. Building Hoover Dam: An Oral History of the Great Depression. University of Nevada Press, 2016.
Kwak, Young Hoon, et al. “What We an Learn from the Hoover Dam Project That Influenced Modern Project Management?” Elsevier, vol. 32, no. 2, Feb. 2014, pp. 256–264., https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0263786313000422?via=ihub.
Rogers, J. David. “Hoover Dam: construction milestones in concrete delivery and placement, steel fabrication, and job site safety.” Hoover Dam: 75th Anniversary History Symposium. 2010.
Smith, Nick. “Classic projects.” Engineering & technology 6.1 (2011): 112-113.
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