Hoover Dam Research Paper

The Hoover Dam is one of the greatest megastructures in the world, for many reasons. This Dam spans the Colorado River in Black Canyon between Arizona and Nevada, about 30 miles southeast of Las Vegas Nevada. In the early 19 hundreds there were extreme flooding from the melting snow in the Rocky Mountains that had came down to the Colorado River. Because of that this is when they decided to construct a dam to control the water flow. Arthur Powell Davis, head of the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation drew up plans for an ambitious dam-building project in 1922. There were two primary locations in which to choose from; they were the Boulder Canyon and the Black Canyon. More than 200 engineers worked to design the dam that would be constructed in Black Canyon. This …show more content…
At its base, Hoover Dam is as thick as two footballs fields measured end-to-end, which is approximately 660 feet, and at the top it is 45 feet wide. Now as many as 20,000 vehicles a day drive across the 45 foot wide top of the dam between Nevada and Arizona. When the dam uses all of its 17 generators it can power up to 100,000 households. So in other words in can use enough electricity to power a city of 750,000 people. Like i stated before is that the Hoover Dam holds back the Colorado River, which is 1,400 miles wrong, it supplies water to Los Angeles, San Diego, and Phoenix. If you were wondering where Arizona gets its water from they, get it from lake Mead. Lake Mead was formed by the Hoover Dam. Lake Mead is the largest reservoir in the United States, it holds enough water to flood the entire of New York. Another interesting fact about the Hoover Dam is that it is 761 feet tall. It is 171 feet taller than the Washington Monument in Washington D.C. and twice as tall as the Luxor Casino in Las Vegas. Now a days the Hoover Dam is considered the 20 tallest dam in the world (221 meters), behind first place Nurek Dam in Tajikistan, who is 300 meters