During the Great Depression, many Americans did not have jobs. The construction of the Hoover dam created work for thousands of people who were from all over the country. It was built primarily to supply electrical power, but also served for water conservation, domestic water supply, and flood controlling of the Colorado River for farmers.
The dam is 726 feet high, 1,244 feet in length, and is 660 feet thick at its base. There are 3,250,000 cubic yards of concrete in the dam, which is enough to build 3000 miles or road – a full-sized highway from one end of the United States to the other. It supplied jobs to a total of 21,000 men, with an average number of daily workers around 3,500 during a time when jobs were scarce.
Eric Hoffer said, “It still holds true that man is most uniquely human when he turns obstacles into opportunities”. The most amazing part about the Hoover Dam is that an entire city was created, in the middle of the Great Depression, for people working on the dam. Boulder City, Nevada was constructed to house the 5,000 project workers. Before the city was built, many jobless men and their families were living in squatters’ settlements around the worksite. Boulder city was situated on federally owned land and had no elected officials until the federal government relinquished control of the land in 1960
PS: No one was buried alive in the concrete though it is a popular myth.