An Executive Digest of the Industry: A Bridge Over Troubled Water

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An Executive Digest of the Industry: A Bridge Over Troubled Water - Hoover Dam at 75

A Bridge Over Troubled Water - Hoover Dam at 75

by Jesse Smith, thesmartset.com, 09.14.2010

What is it about autumn and the dedication of major engineering projects in the American Southwest? Seventy-five years ago, on September 30, 1935, Franklin Roosevelt traveled to the Colorado River just south of Las Vegas to dedicate the Boulder Dam, better known as the Hoover Dam. On October 16, 2010, dignitaries and public spectators will gather 1,500 feet downstream to dedicate the Mike O’Callaghan-Pat Tillman Memorial Bridge, better known as the Hoover Dam Bypass.

Colossus: Hoover Dam and the Making of the American Century by Michael Hiltzik. 512 pages. Free Press. $30.

The Bypass dedication ceremony is going by the nameBridging America. Its website warns attendees to expect high temperatures, dry and windy weather, little shade, minimal refreshments, long waits, and “walking on dirt.” One hopes that with such adverse conditions, spectators don’t fail to note the irony of marking the 75th anniversary of an engineering icon with the opening of a new, $240-million way to get around it.

If you’ve never been to the Hoover Dam, you probably don’t understand why it needs to be bypassed. When I visited this summer, I was driving from the Grand Canyon and asked a park ranger there how long the trip would take. “You’re driving to the dam? On a Sunday?” he asked. “You’re dead meat. You’ll be lucky if you even see the dam.”

I did see it, but traffic was indeed a nightmare. At the dam, Highway 93 — the most direct route between Phoenix and Las Vegas, and a part of the National Highway System’s CANAMEX Corridor, which spans the West from Mexico to Canada — descends both the Arizona and Nevada sides of the Black Canyon with hairpin turns. All traffic then passes directly over the dam in just two lanes. Truck inspections on either side of the canyon, cars’ slowing for pictures on top of the dam, and tourists’ crossing back and forth across the road create a level of gridlock you don’t often get in a major city, let alone the middle of the desert

The bypass will change all that. It is an impressive structure, to be sure. At 900 feet high, it towers over the Hoover Dam. Visitors on the site now look down and up; the dam, bridge, and electric transmission towers that climb out and over the rim work together to establish the entire canyon as a landscape of modernity. With an arch span of 1,060 feet and a total length of 1,900 feet, the new structure is the longest concrete arch bridge in the Western Hemisphere, according to the Federal Highway Administration. “It’s an engineering marvel,” then-U.S. Secretary of Transportation Mary Peters told the Las Vegas Review-Journal last year.

But when it comes to epic public works projects, the Mike O’Callaghan-Pat Tillman Memorial Bridge is no Hoover Dam. The dam was built for epic purposes. It was meant to end the deadly flooding of the Colorado River, which threatened population and economic growth downstream; it would provide a steady supply of water to California’s agriculturally rich Imperial Valley and numerous Southwestern cities and towns; it would generate electricity to pay off its own construction costs. The O’Callaghan-Tillman Bridge may give some truckers a smoother ride. But Hoover Dam gave us Los Angeles and Las Vegas and iceberg lettuce in winter................read more

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Posted by ProTech at 9/14/2010 4:46 PM