Before the glittering lights of Las Vegas, there was a desolate wasteland of barren desert and flash floods that now houses the largest man-made lake in the United States as well as the 18th largest dam in the entire world. Back then, the Hoover Dam was the largest structure of its time, standing seven-hundred and twenty-six feet tall with, “Enough concrete to build a road from New York to San Francisco,” (National Park Service 1). Due to its unprecedented size and the minute section of time spent to build it, this structure claimed numerous lives; despite that, this project offered 21,000 people the chance to avoid unemployment during the Great Depression. The Hoover Dam offered irrigation, some power to surrounding states, jobs for the unemployed,
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The name Herbert Hoover seems to bore many negative connotations. Eight months after he was elected as president, the Stock Market Crash launched the beginning of the Great Depression. He created many public works programs and focused on tax cuts, but none of his approaches were successful. Americans blamed him for the onset of the Great Depression as, “Hoover failed to recognize the severity of the situation or leverage the power of the federal government to squarely address it,” (HISTORY 2); however it is without question that most of the accountability should, in fact, be placed on his predecessors’ policies. So why, then, did Congress settle on the name of ‘Hoover Dam’? Hoover was President during the planning stages of the dam, and secretary Ray Lyman Wilber decided to make a swift political move by publicly declaring the name of it to be the Hoover Dam. In contrast, the people of Boulder City had already begun referring to it as the Boulder Dam due to the fact that the name of a project was often based on location as well as the name of the act that enforced said project. It is for this reason, as well as to insult Hoover, that after Roosevelt took his place in Office, Roosevelt’s secretary of interior Harold Ickes regressed the name back to the Boulder Dam. In honor of Hoover, when President Truman took office, he went against his party and finally changed the name back to the Hoover Dam …show more content…
Now an extremely famous tourist attraction visited by nearly one million people each and every year, this structure continuously brings in a large sum of money. It produces and distributes four billion kilowatt hours of electricity to surrounding cities annually, while also remaining the most prodigious dam in the southwest. Yet, with the effects of global warming and excessive/unnecessary water usage of surrounding states, water levels at Lake Mead have dropped critically. In fact, “Since 1999, Lake Mead has dropped 130 feet and is currently only 41% full. The Hoover Dam now operates at 77% of its design capacity,” (Walton 1). Currently, the levels of the lake leave a ‘bathtub ring’ and are unwaveringly dropping day by day; if these conditions persist, nearby water will no longer be easily accessible to surrounding states, and the dam’s hydroelectricity production will be cut off from approximately 29 million American people
The name Herbert Hoover seems to bore many negative connotations. Eight months after he was elected as president, the Stock Market Crash launched the beginning of the Great Depression. He created many public works programs and focused on tax cuts, but none of his approaches were successful. Americans blamed him for the onset of the Great Depression as, “Hoover failed to recognize the severity of the situation or leverage the power of the federal government to squarely address it,” (HISTORY 2); however it is without question that most of the accountability should, in fact, be placed on his predecessors’ policies. So why, then, did Congress settle on the name of ‘Hoover Dam’? Hoover was President during the planning stages of the dam, and secretary Ray Lyman Wilber decided to make a swift political move by publicly declaring the name of it to be the Hoover Dam. In contrast, the people of Boulder City had already begun referring to it as the Boulder Dam due to the fact that the name of a project was often based on location as well as the name of the act that enforced said project. It is for this reason, as well as to insult Hoover, that after Roosevelt took his place in Office, Roosevelt’s secretary of interior Harold Ickes regressed the name back to the Boulder Dam. In honor of Hoover, when President Truman took office, he went against his party and finally changed the name back to the Hoover Dam …show more content…
Now an extremely famous tourist attraction visited by nearly one million people each and every year, this structure continuously brings in a large sum of money. It produces and distributes four billion kilowatt hours of electricity to surrounding cities annually, while also remaining the most prodigious dam in the southwest. Yet, with the effects of global warming and excessive/unnecessary water usage of surrounding states, water levels at Lake Mead have dropped critically. In fact, “Since 1999, Lake Mead has dropped 130 feet and is currently only 41% full. The Hoover Dam now operates at 77% of its design capacity,” (Walton 1). Currently, the levels of the lake leave a ‘bathtub ring’ and are unwaveringly dropping day by day; if these conditions persist, nearby water will no longer be easily accessible to surrounding states, and the dam’s hydroelectricity production will be cut off from approximately 29 million American people