Hoover Dam Story
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Quick Facts
Location: Arizona and Nevada, USA
Completion Date: 1936
Cost: $165 million
Reservoir Capacity: 1.24 trillion cubic feet
Type: Arch/ Gravity
Purpose: Hydroelectric power/flood control
Reservoir: Lake Mead
Materials: Concrete
Engineers: Bureau of Reclamation
The Hoover Dam is a curved gravity dam. Lake Mead pushes against the dam, creating compressive forces that travel along the great curved wall. The canyon walls push back, counteracting these forces. This action squeezes the concrete in the arch together, making the dam very rigid. This way, Lake Mead can't push it over.
Today, the Hoover Dam is the second highest dam in the country and the 18th highest in the world. It generates more than four billion kilowatt-hours a year, that's enough to serve 1.3 million people!
- At its base, Hoover Dam is as thick (660 feet) as two footballs fields measured end to end. It is 1244 feet across, 45 feet thick at the top, and is 726 feet tall. That's almost 200 feet taller than the Washington Monument in Washington, D.C.
- During peak periods of electrical demands, enough water runs through the generators to fill 15 average-size swimming pools (20,000 gallons each) in one second.
- There is enough concrete in Hoover Dam (4.5 million cubic yards) to build a two-lane road from Seattle, Washington, to Miami, Florida, or a four-foot-wide sidewalk around the Earth at the Equator.
- The Hoover Dam is so thick and heavy, it doesn't even need to be curved! It's heavy enough to resist the weight and thrust of the water pushing behind it, but designers thought people would feel safer with a curved design.
- $165 million dollars to build
4.5 years to build
4.4 million yards of concrete used for construction
March 1931 building began
September 30, 1935 President Franklin D. Roosevelt dedicated the completed dam
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Powerhouse
17 generators
4 billion kilowatt hours produced each year
10 acres of floor space
Icon of U.S. Engineering
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