If, instead of building a dam, they had used that concrete to build a road, it would have been a two-lane highway stretching from San Francisco to New York.
If, instead of building a dam, they had built a skyscraper, it would have been 60 stories high.
If they had built an Egyptian pyramid, there would be stuff left over.
These are some of the amazing facts you will learn right off if you visit Hoover Dam. Everyone is impressed with the size and scope of the thing — and rightly so.
When it was built in the early 1930s, nothing on this scale had been attempted before. When it was finished, it was the highest dam in the world.
Who cares if it has now fallen out of the Top 10 worldwide and is only the third-highest dam in the United States. Those statistics are still impressive. As are these:
Hoover Dam is 726.4 feet high, 45 feet thick at the top, 600 feet thick at the bottom and 1,244 feet across the top. Lake Mead, which was created by the dam, is still the country's largest man-made reservoir. When full, it is 110-115 miles long, with 550 miles of shoreline and a water capacity of about 32 million acre feet — or enough to cover the state of Pennsylvania to a depth of one foot.
As you look at the dam, it is fun to ooh-and-awe over these numbers.
Less obvious visually, but of greater importance economically, is the role Hoover Dam has played — and continues to play — in the West.
If there were no Hoover Dam, there would be no Las Vegas, no Los Angeles — or, at least very different ones. Urban development, agriculture and recreation would not be the same.
You learn many other things at the dam's visitors center, as well. For example, more than one million acres of America's richest crop lands — producing fruits, vegetables, cotton and hay — are irrigated by water made available by Hoover Dam. You learn that more than 18 million people in Las Vegas, Los Angeles, San Diego, Phoenix, Tucson and other southwestern cities and towns have their domestic water needs supplied by the dam.
And, the electricity generated by the hydro-electric power plant — more than 4 billion kilowatt hours a year — serves 1.3 million people in Nevada, Arizona and California. (About 25 percent of the power goes to Nevada, 19 percent to Arizona and the rest to California.)
Located on the Nevada/Arizona border, about an hour's drive from Las Vegas, Hoover Dam draws approximately a million visitors a year. Tour companies offer trips to the dam from most downtown Las Vegas hotels (my Big Horn Wild West Tour took me there in a Hummer). Tour buses and individuals also stop by; on busy days there have been as many as 5,000 tourists.
A visitors center was opened in 1995, with displays, multimedia exhibits and theater presentations. Bureau of Reclamation guides conduct tours that take you down into the bowels of the power plant to see the massive generators at work, as well as to lookout points above the dam for views of its outer workings.
For those with longer time to stay — and for the locals, of course — Lake Mead, above, and Lake Mojave, downstream, offer year-round recreation: swimming, boating, fishing, kayaking.
Even though there are now taller dams and ones that generate more electricity, B of R guides will tell you, Hoover Dam still has a certain "mystique." Its unprecedented achievement and its testament to the power of vision impress all who come.
The story of the dam begins with the Colorado River. In the desert, civilization rises and falls with water, so from the earliest days, inhabitants looked to the river for sustenance.
But in the 1800s and early 1900s, as more and more settlers moved into the area, the capricious nature of the river became evident. In the spring, the river, surging with water from melting snow, often flooded low-lying farms and communities. But in the late summer and early fall, it usually shriveled to a trickle, with hardly enough water to sustain crops.
Back in the Roaring '20s, when everything seemed possible, the idea of taming the river was born. First, however, usage agreements had to be hammered out among the seven states served by the Colorado River. The Colorado River Compact, signed in 1922, divided the river basin into an upper and a lower half and gave half of the river's estimated annual flow to each basin.
In 1928, Congress passed the Boulder Canyon Project Act, which authorized the creation of a dam for "flood control; improvement of navigation and regulation of the Colorado River; storage and delivery of Colorado River waters for reclamation of public lands and other beneficial uses exclusively within the United States; and hydroelectric power production." (Although called Boulder Dam at first, the site for the structure is actually in Black Canyon. In 1947, the name was officially changed to honor Herbert Hoover, who helped forge the compact while he was secretary of commerce.)
Seeing the need was one thing; building the dam was another. Construction was beyond the ability of any one company of the day, so six of them came together to form Six Companies Inc., a consortium that received the contract with a bid just under $49 million.
Construction began in 1931. The first task was to remove all loose rock from the canyon walls, a task performed by "high scalers," who did the job strapped into heavy-duty suspension ropes that lowered them over the side of the canyon. A statue at the visitors center honors these intrepid workers and helps you to appreciate what they did — for 75 cents an hour.
The next task was to build diversion tunnels to send the river around the construction site. Those took 13 months to complete.
Then came the concrete that would, through record-breaking daily pours, inch the dam up the canyon walls. Not only were more than 3 million cubic yards of concrete used (enough to build a 4-foot-wide sidewalk around the equator), it also required the world's largest refrigeration unit to cool it as it dried.
The remote location and harsh weather conditions, especially in summer, added to the challenge. Even so, the dam was completed two years ahead of schedule and under budget. On Sept. 30, 1935, when it was dedicated, President Franklin D. Roosevelt called it "an engineering victory of the first order."
Appreciation of the dam has continued to grow. Today, it is not only a National Historic Landmark but also a National Historic Civil Engineering Landmark. It is named one of America's Seven Modern Civil Engineering Wonders, and it is No. 5 on a list of "Construction Achievements of the 20th Century."
At the site, you can learn the history. You can walk across the dam, from Nevada to Arizona, and get interesting views from those sides, as well as up and down river. You can stop by the "Winged Figures of the Republic" monument created by sculptor Oskar J.W. Hansen. These 30-foot-high bronze figures are "mighty of body and clean of soul, armed only in the winged imagination of their own thoughts" and thus represent "the mental fire, daring and imagination" of the builders of Hoover Dam.
You can rub their toes for good luck, if you like.
On your way to or from the dam, you will likely pass through Boulder City, which was created to house the more than 5,000 workers who came, in the heart of the Great Depression, to work on the dam. It was designed as a model city and described in early newspaper articles "as spic and span as though it were in the charge of Dutch housewives."
In the early days, there was no drinking or no gambling in Boulder City. In 1960, the government sold its interests, and Boulder City became like any other Nevada town, except there is still no gambling. But you still see some of that early model-city flavor.
You will also go by Railroad Pass, which in 1931 became the first legal casino in Nevada. Workers returning to the dam from weekends off had to stop at Railroad Pass and take a sobriety test. Only those who passed were allowed to enter the construction site.
Driving back to Las Vegas, you might also look at the surrounding landscape in a different way. You might be more aware of the desert flora and fauna — the creosote bushes and Mojave yucca that are about the only things that grow — and of the heat and the harshness of the area.
You might notice the contrasts in the desert and the city that rose from it and wonder, indeed, what it would be like if there was no Hoover Dam.
E-mail: carma@desnews.com