Stuff You Should Know - How the Hoover Dam Works, Part I

Episode Date: April 16, 2019

It’s one of America’s biggest accomplishments in the 20th century, a slab of concrete holding back one of the country’s most finicky rivers, providing water and electricity to a swath of majors cities that otherwise couldn’t exist. Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.comSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

On the podcast, Hey Dude, the 90s called, David Lasher and Christine Taylor, stars of the cult classic show, Hey Dude, bring you back to the days of slip dresses and choker necklaces. We're gonna use Hey Dude as our jumping off point, but we are going to unpack and dive back into the decade of the 90s.

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Listen to Frosted Tips with Lance Bass on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts. Welcome to Step You Should Know, a production of iHeart radios, How Stuff Works. Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark, who's Charles, Chuck Bryant, and there's Jerry Rowland over there.

And if you put all three of us together, you get a little something called stuff you should know. Oh man, you did something drunk. The Hoover Dam, Hoover Dam edition. Uva. Have you ever been to Hoover Dam? I've been there twice. Oh, I don't show off.

Yeah, I went, I went in 91. Oh, the great Hoover Dam tour of 91, sure. It was either, man, it may have been 89, almost cussed right then. Yeah, I heard that. I almost did that the other day too. I'm getting to movie crushy. Sure.

It may have been 89 or 90. It was when I went out to visit my brother when he lived in LA and we met in Las Vegas, drove down to the Hoover Dam and then back to LA. So 89 and 90. Was it the first time you guys met? Yeah, it was great. And then I went again in 96 for sure, 96. And I think both times I took the tour

and it's, have you ever been? It's really something else. Yeah, it's for the first time. You mean I went about a year ago. We drove from Scottsdale to Vegas and stopped in Hoover Dam on the way and it was great. As you do. It was very, very cool.

Well, there's nothing, nothing, nothing, nothing. Hoover Dam, Vegas is kind of how it goes. Yeah, and we'll get to the water levels, but it's startling from when I was there, what it looks like now. Yeah, I can imagine. Like if you had gone any time before about 2000, from what I understand, it's like a different place.

Yeah. But the dam's still there and it's still intact and doing really well. You got that at least, right? It's just the ecological catastrophe that's kind of looming that kind of is a downer. That's right. And we should give a big shout out to Julia Layton

who used to be one of the great, great writers for howstuffworks.com back when we were still associated with that website. I think she might still write for him occasionally. Oh, really? Well, she's great. And now we are commissioning some articles from her and boy, she's good.

Yes, she is. So what's her nickname, Chuck the Lates? Julia Layton, Lates. No, cause it sounds like she's not tardy. Oh yeah, that's right. Let's just call her Dr. Layton. Okay, there you go. Although I don't think she's a doctor,

but she does have her master's in writing. That's right, so. Way better than me. She cranks out some good stuff. That's right, so thanks, Julia. I'm glad you called that out, Chuck, well done. So let's go back, shall we, to a time in the little area

of the Southwest of the United States where Arizona reaches out to hug Nevada, Nevada. Which way are we supposed to say it? Well, we're supposed to say Nevada, but we're not from there, so we'll say Nevada. Right, like everybody else, right? And where they almost meet, there's a little gorge. There's a canyon.

Well, there's a lot of canyons, but there's one in particular, and it's called Boulder Canyon. And if you went to Boulder Canyon today to find the Hoover Dam, you would be SOL. Because while they were originally going to build the Hoover Dam at Boulder Canyon, so much so that the name of the project

for the first decade or so was called the Boulder Dam. Just Boulder once, not two boulders, the Boulder Dam Project. They actually moved it a little further upstream to a much more suitable site called Black Canyon. And if you go visit the Hoover Dam today, that's where you're actually going.

It's Black Canyon, where Nevada and Arizona almost meet. That's right, and this idea was conceived, this concrete, gravity arch hydroelectric dam, hydroelectric? Almost, almost there. Hydoelectric, excuse me. This was all conceived because, well, for three reasons plus a cherry on top.

One is that the Colorado River had a bad habit of flooding and causing lots of devastation. Just a nasty boy. So to lasso that beast. Number two, to create water in times of drought, as a, you know, creating a big reservoir that would be Lake Mead, to create energy. I love things that kill all these birds, you know?

So many dead birds around there. And I love birds. And then finally, the little cherry on top. Those were the three big reasons they did it. But the cherry on top, it turns out has been Lake Mead tourism is huge. Yeah, I think Lake Mead was the first nationally designated recreation area.

Oh yeah? Yeah. It sounds almost Soviet, doesn't it? Like the government's like, this is where you recreate on this particular designated lake. Travel to the fun zone. So yeah, the first one, I think there was like this. This is the 1920s, I think,

when the project is really starting to gain steam. And the guy who was the secretary of commerce at the time, Herbert Hoover, who would very soon be the president of the United States, who would very shortly after that be like the most hated man in America. Hoover was like, this is a great idea. There's like this whole spot of land down in the lower United States.

And it just wants to be so much more than it is. It wants to be cropland. It wants to be cattle pasture. It wants to be a big old city like LA or Vegas. They're just waiting to pop, but they really are having trouble with water and with flooding. Like it's weird.

It's like the Colorado River would be like, not enough, sorry. And then oh, too much, way more than you ever wanted. And because of this kind of mercurial nature of it, there was just not a lot that could be done with the Southwest unless you figured out a way to tame that river. And like you were saying, that's what the Hoover Dam was originally intended to do.

And that's definitely what it did. I mean, just to kind of let the cat out of the bag early, it was successful as far as dam projects go. Yeah. And just to clear something up, when you just said Herbert Hoover said big cities like LA and Vegas, he had a crystal ball on Vegas because Vegas was cow town back then. Yeah, population 5,000 at around 1930.

Yeah, people didn't want to go there until gambling started happening. They did have gambling. They had gambling, they had prostitution. Did they really? Yes, they had drinking. I guess casinos, thanks to, what's his name, Bugsy. Yeah, Bugsy was one of the first, wasn't he?

I think so. He wasn't the first, was he? I mean, I saw that movie and if I remember correctly, Warren Beatty built that Flamingo Casino and Hotel and that was kind of the first major casino, if I'm not mistaken. That sounds like a guy who deserves his own episode of Stuff You Should Know.

Who, Bugsy or Warren Beatty? But Bugsy. Okay. Warren Beatty maybe gets the short stuff. So the cut, oh man, what a cut, burn. It's better than just ignoring his existence, what do you think? Well, that's true. So the Colorado River, like we said,

it's the seventh longest in the US, about close to 1500 miles of total flow. And I believe that it distributes water, that the river itself and then it's tributaries to about 25 million people, 15% of the crops in the US and 13% of the livestock drink its water in the United States. It does now.

Well, sure. So before this, before the Hoover Dam Project, when the Colorado just did whatever the Colorado wanted to do, it's not like the people of the Southwest had not tried to tame it before. They had extensive irrigation canals and ditches and dikes and earthworks and everything they could think of

to keep the river going this way or that way and to keep it from flooding and none of it worked. I mean, it would work some, like yes, an irrigation canal would work and you could irrigate your crops, but eventually the river was gonna flood and because you had diverted the river toward your cropland, when it flooded, it flooded that irrigation ditch

and it flooded your cropland too, which was a real problem for you because it would, when eventually it would recede, you might have a lot more dirt than you're used to. Probably pretty fertile dirt, but your crops would be gone. Maybe some of your cows got carried away. You might have lost your 10 gallon hat. It's not a good deal when your cropland gets flooded.

And so this was kind of what was going on when they were trying to tame the Colorado. It was just way too big of a project for a handful of even large scale farmers to take on, which is one reason why the federal government stepped in because at the time there was really no entity that could take on a project like this. And even then there were a lot of questions like,

I'm not even sure the US government can handle this kind of thing. And the government said, well, watch and learn suckers. Yeah, so it's 1918 when the US Bureau of Reclamation said, all right, I think we can build a dam of all dams. We're gonna make it a gravity arch design. I think that can handle the Colorado River and we're gonna have tunnels and turbines and towers

and we're gonna prevent flooding and we're gonna deliver water to people. And the best news is we're gonna create, well, all that's great news, but more great news is we're gonna create energy for a ton of people such that this thing will even pay for itself in 50 years time. And like you said, a lot of people, I mean, it was 1918

and a lot of people are like, I don't even, engineers were saying, I don't know if this is possible. Right. And so not only were people incredulous that it was even possible, there's seven states that draw water from the Colorado River, which is a pretty long river.

It goes, it starts in the Rocky Mountains. That's where it's fed by snowmelt up there. And then it goes all the way down to Mexico. And so seven states lay claim on water. They need water from the Colorado River to live, to irrigate their crops, to feed their livestock. It's the kind of like the main artery for life in the Southwest or one of them.

And when they found out that people in these seven states found out the US government was wanting to dam and control the river, they got really worried that really this was just a project to divert all that beautiful water over to California. Because California had it going on by the late 20s, you know, the early mid 20s already, thanks to Los Angeles, well, thanks to Los Angeles.

But it had a lot of potential and it was growing San Francisco too. Sure, it was growing. Sure, it was growing in between those two cities. And so the people in like New Mexico and Colorado and Arizona and Nevada were really worried that this was really just the federal government stepping in and saying, thanks a lot,

we're gonna take this water and send it off to California. And Herbert Hoover actually intervened and said, no, no, no, how about this? Before we even get this project underway, we will broker a deal for how the water from the Colorado River gets distributed. And I'm Herbert Hoover, I'm going to be the most hated man in the world.

So I'm going to actually purposely inflate the capacity that this reservoir will hold so that no one feels like they're gonna get left out. And everybody ended up signing on. So that was technically step negative one or maybe step zero before the plan was even fully adopted by the government. Yeah, and it was called the Colorado River Compact.

And again, it was just to make, I think the only ones you left out were Utah and Wyoming and then the other five. And they said, all right, the way you've apportioned it looks good to us. California was like, we all know that we're really gonna get the most water, right?

And he was like, totally, don't worry about it, everyone's gonna hate me soon. And many people will hate California one day too. And so Congress said, this looks great, let's push forward. Despite the fact, I don't think we mentioned yet that the private sector, of course, I mean, if you think the private sector and the government have been,

it's like a newish thing that they're arguing over stuff like this, think again, because since the dawn of time in the United States, the government and the private sector have squabbled. And so obviously private power companies and water companies and just everybody was like, geez, I don't like the sounds of this, like the government's gonna start

getting into the electricity business. But regardless, they had no choice. Congress approved the Boulder Dam project, like you said, that would later move to Black Canyon. And for many, many years, it was kind of bounced back and forth between Boulder Dam and then Hoover Dam. They officially called it Hoover Dam in 1931,

but like you said, four times, Hoover, people didn't like him when he left office. So they went, let's call it the Boulder Dam again. And then it took a congressional resolution in 1947 to finally bring it back and give Hoover his due. Right, and the reason why people hated Hoover, especially right after he left office, like he was a super conservative president.

He believed that the federal government should intervene in business and personal affairs as little as possible. So in the grips, the worst parts of the Great Depression, the greatest economic recession that's ever hit the world, he was literally vetoing bills that would give federal assistance to Americans. So he was very much hated and reviled by the average person and just about everybody when he was soundly defeated by FDR,

I think in 1932. That sounded so uneasy. 1930-ish too? The 1930-ish election. So obviously, if you're gonna undertake a project and award contracts to companies to build this thing, there's probably not one company that can tackle something like this,

that has all the different skills necessary to build something like the Hoover Dam. So six actually companies, six big, big construction firms got together and formed what was called, wait for it, the six companies. In 1931, and they served as the kind of mega construction firm that undertook this huge, huge project. Yeah, they bid the project out at like 48.8 million dollars.

Which is so funny to think about now, like it's a little money for something like this. Yeah, even when you adjust for inflation, it's still a surprisingly low amount. It comes out to about 800 million dollars. And it's like the federal government today spends billion dollars, like it's nothing. This is like a huge deal

that the federal government was spending the equivalent of today's 800 million dollars. But one reason why they went with the six companies consortium is because the Bureau of Reclamation, this is the department that oversaw the project, they had calculated the cost themselves. And the six companies bid was only about $24,000 more than the Bureau of Reclamation

had estimated the project would cost. How much? About 24 grand over. Some change. Right, so they were like, all right, if you want to build this whole project for $24,000, have at it. And I mean, obviously they were six legitimate

major construction companies, and then all of them combined together formed one super construction company. So they seem to be pretty comfortable with this consortium. And from everything I can tell, unless you're a worker's rights kind of person, this company, their faith in this consortium was well placed because they did a pretty good job

saving maybe one major mistake, which we'll get to later. It's a pretty good government construction project, if you ask me, public-private partnership. All right, I feel like we should take a break now and come back and talk about infrastructure right after this. Hey dude, the 90s called David Lasher and Christine Taylor, stars of the cult classic show, Hey Dude, bring you back to the days of slip dresses

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Listen to Frosted Tips with Lance Bass on the iHeart Radio app, Apple podcast, or wherever you listen to podcasts. All right, so we're back and it would take a couple of years, obviously you're not going to dive into a project like this right away because you can't back then because of where it was located. And if you think about it,

like part of the problem with this project from the beginning was its location and how isolated the Southwest was from other like major parts of the US at the time. And so they were like, wait a minute, we're not close to anything. Like Vegas only is the closest place and it has 5,000 people.

That doesn't really help us much. It's like 20, 30 miles away. So here's what we're gonna have to do. We're gonna have to build a town that's really close by for all of our employees and our workers to live. And so they did just that. I think this was about six miles away.

They literally constructed a city called Boulder City, west of the dam site. It had 758 cottages if you were married and worked or had a family or whatever. It had nine dormitories for single men. I imagine that was a wild scene. They had a hospital, they had a department store, they had a laundry, they had a school,

they had a post office, they had liquor stills. And that's- Those were illegal, by the way. Sure, of course, it was depression or prohibition. Right. But they needed their booze, let's be honest. And this city actually remained under government control until 1959 when it got its own incorporation,

which is kind of crazy. Yeah, the Hoover Dam was dedicated, like the project was done basically by 1938, 1939. I think they're still working on outbuildings and stuff for a little while. But for 20 years after, a lot of the people who had built the dam were like, I really like this Boulder City town.

I'm gonna stay here. And one of the reasons why you would stay there is because like the government ran the town, there were no elected officials. There was an appointed Bureau of Reclamation Department like administrator, that was like the de facto mayor of the town. And like if there was something wrong with your house,

Bureau of Reclamation workers would come fix it, like your sink or paint your house or whatever. You didn't have to do anything because the government, this was like federal land. And finally in 19, what'd you say, 59? 59. The government was like, all right, free loaders. You can paint your own houses from now on.

This is your place. And they incorporated it into a city in 1960, I guess. Yeah, and it's still one of two cities in Nevada that say no gambling here, which is pretty unique. You know, at the height of this project, you took Boulder City, which hadn't existed just a couple of years before, like it wasn't like they took over an existing city and built it up.

There was nothing there before and they built the city from scratch. It had the biggest population in Nevada at the time. Yeah, more than Vegas. Yeah, by a few hundred people, I believe. All right, so they built, I mean, this is keep in mind again. This is before they can even get started on this dam. They say, we got to build a city.

We got to build seven miles of highway. We got to build 23 miles of railway. We got to build, bring in like 200 miles of power lines and we have to bring in cableways spanning this canyon. And it's just all this massive amounts of infrastructure to tackle this project where they were gonna be paying dudes 50 cents to a dollar 25 an hour, which is between eight bucks and 20 bucks an hour in today dollars.

Right, what's ironic is the harder and the more dangerous your job, typically the less you were paid. Kind of like today. Kind of, yeah. Sometimes. There was a group called the Muckers and they were the ones who had to like get the stone

and the sludge and all that stuff out of the canyon bottom. And they got paid the least, even though they were the most exposed to like falling rocks and falling items. And apparently like falling stuff was a real danger on this project. Yeah, we'll get to that later, but a lot of Noggins suffered.

Right. So then the other thing that they had to do, they're like, all right, we got the city built. We got all these highways and we got all this stuff. We got all these people, we got a good plan. They're like, we need to do something with this river because you can't just start stacking rocks and divert the Colorado river.

So they literally had to come up with a plan to reroute the Colorado river while they built this thing. I hadn't thought about that. I'm sure you knew about it two times over from your double visits in the tour. Did you tour it? No. Did you just drive across it?

No, we walked around. We didn't take one of the actual like tours tours. You were like, it was 17 bucks. You kidding me? I was like, I'm sure I know as much as this guy. But no, no, I mean, like we took the whole thing and we were there for a couple hours or anything, but it was self-guided tour.

How about that? Oh, gotcha. No, that's great. But it had never occurred to me, and I didn't learn on this self-guided tour that we just made up ourselves, that you would have to divert the river, that the river was still going through Black Canyon

at the time and you just couldn't build the dam there while the river was trying to get through there. You can never do that. There's a lot of stuff you could do. To divert the river, they did some really ingenious stuff. And if you step back and look at it from like the eyes of like a child, it's really just two, three, four steps

in building this dam. And that's true. If you really look at it super high level or super, I guess, childlike again, in all of them make total sense, but just the audacity of saying, yeah, we can do that. Yeah, add that extra step on before we get started. It really kind of goes to the heart of like,

just what an amazing civil engineering project this was. Oh yeah, so like with any dam, if you wanna divert that water, you're gonna have to go upstream a certain amount and they have very smart engineers that figure out exactly where to do this. And in this case, they built coffer dams, which is a very common thing to do

when you wanna build a dam downstream. It's basically sort of like a big hole in the river that the water would just flow into these. So the water instead of going downstream dumps into these coffer dams and then it funnels that water into these four tunnels, two on each side of the canyon, under the canyon instead of between them,

diverting everything around to then rejoin the other, those tunnels rejoin each other as the Colorado River once again downstream. Right, and I think the coffer dam is actually kind of like an earthworks, like a wall inside the water. Yeah, it's a big hole. Well, you pump the water out, you kind of make it a hole. But yeah, so these tunnels that they diverted this to, Chuck,

where it combined four miles, four miles of tunnel. So each tunnel was about a mile, because there were four of them, through the canyon rock, which was granite, and they dug out these tunnels and built the coffer dam just to start the whole thing. Not as part of the larger project, but this was like to just to get started,

that was the first thing they had to do. Yeah, there were 50 feet in diameter, like these were not small tunnels. They had to be lined with three feet of concrete to hold up. And I think the water was racing through those at a rate of 200,000 cubic feet per second. That's so fast.

It's amazing. That's 136 Olympic size pools per minute, passing through there. Yeah, I mean, this would be remarkable today, dude. Yeah, for sure. And as we'll see, those things are still in operation, although they use them differently now. But yeah, that's just a ton of water.

And they said, yep, success, it worked. We diverted this water further downstream because the tunnels ended below the dam project site. And then all of a sudden the Colorado River had been diverted around the dam and now they could get started. Right, and so they were like, all right, we feel like we could just quit now

because what we did was pretty awesome, but we don't have a dam yet. So in this huge canyon, if we're gonna build a dam, we need to make these walls smooth because it was a canyon, it was just jagged rock and you can't just fill in a bunch of concrete against this jagged rock. They have these abutments that are gonna

secure this huge concrete slab to the canyon walls. So they had to smooth these things out. And that was done by, I mean, I wanna say the most dangerous job, but it's kind of hard to pick. But the high scalers are definitely up there as far as danger goes. If you go to the Hoover Dam site today,

there's a statue of a high scaler. It's a guy on a rope with a tool bag hanging from him. He's scaling down the side of the canyon wall. And that's exactly what they did because if you're trying to clear the canyon walls and you're talking your 700 feet up between the bottom of the canyon and the canyon rim, you got a lot of rock that you're trying to get out of there.

It's not easy. You can't just hit it with a pole and pry it loose. You have to blast it loose, actually. They did hit it with poles too, though. Sure, but to no avail. They spent a good year and a half trying that and nothing happened. But the, I'm totally joking about that, by the way.

Yes. Okay. To blast it though, Chuck, you have to drill a hole and then put the dynamite in and then blast it. But if you're trying to drill a hole somewhere, halfway between the canyon ridge and the canyon bottom, you have to have a guy on a rope who is willing to swing down there,

have a jackhammer, 44 pound jackhammer lowered to him and then drill a hole with a jackhammer, suspended from the edge of the canyon into the midair and then pack it full of dynamite, light it, get out of the way, let the blast happen and then come back and then use a pole to pry the rocks loose. Yeah.

That's what these guys had to do. And if you want to know how jackhammers work, everybody, let me tell you, we have maybe our best episode ever in 11-ish years is jackhammers. Seriously, it was the worst one we've ever done. Like there's no question. Like the sun, ha ha, you know, it was terrible. Jackhammers was actually bad.

At least the sun's an interesting thing. Right, right, good point. All right, so they're blasting these things out. These dudes, believe it or not, did not even have hard hats at the time. They were not supplied with hard hats. No, and that's one big criticism of the six companies consortium,

that they did not care about workers' rights. There was a strike that happened in 1931 and the guy running the show for the six companies, his name was Frank Crow. They called him Hurry Up Crow. He fired everybody. He just fired everybody and brought in new workers. They didn't get hard hats until they basically said,

we're not gonna work anymore unless you give us hard hats. They had to make their own hard hats by taking soft hats, which I guess is just a hat. And then putting it in like coal tar and letting it like molten coal tar and then letting it cool. And all of a sudden you had like a homemade hard hat.

And then finally the company's just like, all right, you're making us look bad. We'll get some actual ones. But it took like a little while before they had any actual hard hats on site. Yeah, those homemade ones are called hard-boiled hats. And they really actually worked. I know that thing you sent said that

some of the rocks falling on these hard-boiled hats, their head would be fine. But it would be such force that it would actually break their jaw. So they worked. These hard-boiled hats actually worked. But I imagine they wanted the real thing. You'd be like, I can't think though.

And they would do tricks and stuff. Like in their downtime, they would, a lot of these people were, I mean, not a lot, but some of them were like circus workers and people like former military that could do this kind of thing. And apparently between working, they would fly around

and do little high-wire tricks and stuff. Basically, and Native Americans too. And you always hear about when the skyscrapers were built, they'd be like, yeah, we just hired a bunch of Native Americans and they'll run all over steel beams as much as you please without any fear. And I've always wondered why that's the case.

And it's gotta just be some sweeping generalization that Native Americans aren't afraid of heights, obviously. But like, are there specific tribes that were exposed to things like cliff walls for generations and generations and that they became used to these dizzying heights so that it wasn't a big deal. And those are the same tribes that made their way out

to New York to build the skyscrapers too. We gotta get to the bottom of that one. Or maybe they were just tough and not scared of anything. They just didn't let on. Yeah, it's possible. But we have to tell this once, the story of Burl R. Rutledge though, man.

Like I almost faint just reading about it. I'm sure, because you don't love heights. No, I don't love heights. So let's just go over this one more time. If you were in the canyon rim of the Boulder Dam, Hoover Dam project at the time, you were more than 700 feet above the bottom of the canyon, which for all intents and purposes is straight down.

That's like a 60 story building, basically. That's a really, really big height. And you can sense it, man. When you're there in Hoover Dam, if you haven't been, go. It's totally worth the trip for sure, especially if you're in Las Vegas. But there was a guy named Burl Rutledge,

who was one of the engineers for the Bureau of Reclamation. And I guess he lost his footing or something and he fell off, off the canyon rim on his way down to the canyon bottom, a 60 story building below him. That's right. And thankfully he either had a former circus worker or somebody who was just very brave,

named Oliver Cowan, about 25 feet below. Apparently heard this. I guess it caused a bit of a commotion and swung himself out. He's hanging in a, it's called a Borson seat. That's like sort of like a little sling seat. He rushes over as fast as he can go, swinging out and grabs this guy's leg

as he's sliding down the canyon wall. And then another high-scaler named Arnold Parks then swings over, helps him pin his body to the wall and they held him there until they could drop a line and pull him up. If I were Rutledge, I would have been like, just let me go, just let me go. I can't stand this.

I'm so scared. They're like, Josh, we've really got you. You know, you're okay. I don't care. I can't take that. Now it's all over. I'm never gonna be the same again. Well, that's probably true.

You would just move to the lowest place in the contiguous United States. I can't imagine what the rest of Burl Rutledge's day was after that. I bet it was good. I bet he drank a lot. I hope it was a good day. Yeah.

But yeah, so that happened. Like the thing that everyone's imagination thinks of when you think of a bunch of people doing construction work on a canyon ledge, that happened. And it actually penned up pretty well for Burl Rutledge at least. All right, man, I think it's time for a message break. Agreed.

Hey dude, the 90s called David Lasher and Christine Taylor, stars of the cult classic show, Hey Dude, bring you back to the days of slip dresses and choker necklaces. We're gonna use Hey Dude as our jumping off point, but we are going to unpack and dive back into the decade of the 90s. We lived it, and now we're calling on all of our friends

to come back. We're gonna use Hey Dude as our jumping off point, but we are going to unpack and dive back into all of our friends to come back and relive it. It's a podcast packed with interviews, co-stars, friends, and nonstop references to the best decade ever. Do you remember going to Blockbuster? Do you remember Nintendo 64?

Do you remember getting Frosted Tips? Was that a cereal? No, it was hair. Do you remember AOL Instant Messenger and the dial-up sound like poltergeist? So leave a code on your best friend's beeper because you'll want to be there when the nostalgia starts flowing.

Each episode will rival the feeling of taking out the cartridge from your Game Boy, blowing on it and popping it back in as we take you back to the 90s. Listen to Hey Dude, the 90s, called on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey, I'm Lance Bass, host of the new iHeart Podcast,

Frosted Tips with Lance Bass. The hardest thing can be knowing who to turn to when questions arise or times get tough or you're at the end of the road. Ah, okay, I see what you're doing. Do you ever think to yourself, what advice would Lance Bass and my favorite boy bands give me in this situation?

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And so my husband, Michael. Um, hey, that's me. Yep, we know that, Michael. And a different hot, sexy teen crush boy bander each week to guide you through life, step by step. Oh, not another one. Kids, relationships, life in general can get messy. You may be thinking, this is the story of my life.

Just stop now. If so, tell everybody, yeah, everybody about my new podcast and make sure to listen. So we'll never, ever have to say bye, bye, bye. Listen to Frosted Tips with Lance Bass on the iHeart Radio app, Apple podcast, or wherever you listen to podcasts. All right, so dudes are dying though.

I saw anywhere between like 93 to 96 to 100 people died total in the whole project, which all things being equal for what they were doing, is it that high of a number? 100 lives is a lot though, to be lost on a civic engineering project. Yeah, I saw as high as 112. And the six companies, again,

they weren't exactly known for having like the loosest pockets if you filed some sort of health claim against them for, you know, an injury or an illness sustained working on the job. There was, I think like 36, 42 people associated with the project died of pneumonia. But I think the Las Vegas star did an investigation either years later at the time and said,

there were basically no deaths back at Boulder City of pneumonia. If there was pneumonia, it would have been going around Boulder City. And we think that really pneumonia is just a code word from the six companies for carbon monoxide poisoning, because the six companies wanted to cover it up so they didn't have to pay out any, you know,

money to the family because they accidentally killed the dad with carbon monoxide poisoning because he was working all day alongside like a diesel engine in one of these, you know, mile long tunnels. Wow. Yeah, so that was the kind of stuff that they endured. Heat stroke killed a lot of people too. Oh yeah, in the summer of 1933 alone,

apparently about three people per week were dying of heat stroke. Because dude, in the sun, in these tunnels in particular, apparently you would get up to 140 degrees Fahrenheit, which is some ungodly amount in Celsius too. And then in the shade on the worst days, it would get to like 120 degrees in the shade.

It's a dry heat though. Sure, it's not the heat, it's the humidity, unless it's 120 and then it doesn't matter. Yeah, and one of the common urban legends is that there are dead bodies in the concrete of Hoover Dam. That is not true and I love how Julia put it. Common decency aside, she says, it would have compromised the structural integrity.

So they had to fish these bodies out because if you were a body in concrete, you're gonna decompose eventually and that's gonna leave bubbles and introduce gas into the concrete and that's gonna weaken the structure. So they had to fish all these bodies out. And even still, we'll talk about the concrete next, but just to kind of lay the foundation for this point,

if you'll forgive the pun. When they poured a bucket's worth of concrete to build the dam face, the dam itself, I guess, the dam was so enormous that a whole bucket only raised the level of concrete by like two to six inches, depending on the block they were pouring. So if you fell into the concrete, you fell into two inches of concrete, basically.

So you weren't gonna get lost in the concrete or anything like that. And then on top of that, yeah, even if they did not care about whether you spent eternity entombed, they would be like, well, you're not gonna screw with the integrity of our dam. So yes, there's no dead bodies in there.

No dead bodies. So let's talk about the concrete, shall we, real quick? Yeah, so at this point, the walls are clean and smooth. They've got these abutments in place. They're all... Which by the way, if I may. Yes. Okay, so I looked all over for the abutments.

And all I ever saw was it's the walls of the canyon, the rock walls of the canyon are the abutments. From what I can gather, you know how when you grab somebody nicely and jokingly by the shoulders, right? And are holding them securely like this, right? So you've got your thumbs on the front of their arms. And you've got their fingers on their back

of their arms like that, right? Your fingers and thumbs are acting as abutments. And so the abutments that are holding rather than this poor sap, who again, you're just joking around with, rather than that person, these abutments are the canyon walls holding the dam itself in place. That's right.

Okay. Had you ever heard the word abutment or were you just... I mean, I had, but I couldn't tell if they were like parts of that stuck out of the dam or parts that stuck out of the canyon walls. And I don't know, maybe it was one of those things where everybody else knows what abutments is. And that's why no one went to the trouble of explaining it.

But I couldn't find it like spelled out or a good picture saying, here's the abutments. So I just assumed that no one else knew and I was the only one digging into it. But now I feel like my eyes have been open. Well, I have the three fake teeth and implants. So I know what abutments are. There you go.

It's different in your teeth, but not really. Same word. Yeah, same function. Right. So these abutments are in place and they were like, all right, we got to start pouring some concrete. The design itself, a lot of dams use this design.

It's called a gravity arch. And it's basically just using the natural pressure of the land to kind of force everything tight into that, tighten down that concrete between those two canyons. Yeah, it's really ingenious, dude. It's just like an arched bridge where gravity presses down on the arch,

which makes the arch press in to say like the walls of the canyon that the bridge is crossing. And the walls of the canyon push back, which only strengthens the bridge. Same exact thing. It's like if you took a bridge, an arch bridge and put it on its side, that's what the Hoover Dam is. So when the water presses into that curve of the arch,

it tries to straighten the dam, which presses the dam into the sides of the canyon walls, which press back, which strengthens the dam. It's ingenious. Ingenious, I tell you. Yeah, and so they didn't even need that. That's kind of the funny part about all of this. There's so much concrete that it could have been

a flat slab, which a lot of dams are, but apparently the engineers thought that would freak people out to have a flat slab dam that big. And so they said, let's just curve it anyway, because everyone understands basic physics, right? Right, and it looks cool. And it does look very cool.

All right, so we're actually finally to the concrete. There are 3.25 million cubic yards of concrete that make up the Hoover Dam. And then another 1.11 million cubic yards, and it's not just the dam face. There's a lot of, you know, it houses a power plant and all these outlying structures. And five million barrels of cement,

five million barrels went into mixing all this concrete, which they mixed onsite in rail cars, hoisted down on these cableways that they had built. And every 78 seconds, these workers would get a new bucket of concrete to pour. Right, right, four until about five feet of the dam had been poured. And then after that, they had to stop for 72 hours

to let it cure, because curing is a huge part when you're working with concrete. If it doesn't cure right, then the stuff inside is going to take longer to cure than the stuff outside, which isn't that big of a deal if you're pouring like, you know, a driveway in a house or something like that.

But when you're pouring a dam that has to have like really exact dimensions, you have to keep the outside and the inside curing at about the same rate. So they came up with this really ingenious way to cure this concrete really fast. And they ran pipes, steel pipes, all through all the concrete that they poured.

So there's steel pipes running all over the Hoover Dam inside of it. And they cooled water onsite to like all, like just above freezing. And they pumped it through these pipes so that when they were pouring concrete, the concrete was being cooled internally and they were spraying it with water on the outside too.

So it was curing at about the same rate inside as it was outside. And it was curing fast in about 72 hours where if they had poured a slab, if they poured the Hoover Dam in one big slab and just left it, first of all, it would have been all messed up all kinds of ways. But it also would have taken about 125 years

to cure fully on its own. It'd still be curing now. But they managed to get these, you know, five foot increments to cure in about 72 hours. So again, I mean, another, just the idea that they, like nobody had really tried something like this on the scale. So these people were kind of making it up

and going and doing the math as they went along and they were right like time after time. That's the most astounding part to me. Yeah, I mean, the heat is a big problem for concrete because it's gonna expand in that heat. And then, you know, in the desert, it can cool down quite a bit. You know, the temperature variation

between the heat of day and at night can be really drastic. And so it's really tough to control all that. And they managed to do it, which is remarkable. They divide this whole thing up into blocks and there are 200 blocks total making up the Hoover Dam. Depending, they're smaller at the downstream face and they are upstream, but they range from about 25 square feet to 60 square feet.

And all of those blocks together, all 200 of them, make up the Hoover Dam. Finally, on May 29th, 1935, they poured that last bucket of concrete, which I imagine was a pretty darn good day. I'll bet it was too. And then after that, after that last block of concrete cured,

they squeezed grout, which is cement and water, like a really kind of slushy mixture, into every crack and crevice there was in between those blocks to form a solid sheet. And then just for good measure, they pumped grout into those cooling pipes. So, and then they capped that off. So inside the Hoover Dam,

there's enough concrete to make a 16 foot wide, eight inch deep road all the way from San Francisco to New York. Amazing. It is amazing. So, dude, I think we should do this into two parts. If Evil Knievel got a two-parter, I think the Hoover Dam deserves a two-parter too.

We've been at it for 45 minutes, so there's still a long, long way to go. So, should we do that? Yes, let's. So, since we're doing a two-parter, I guess that brings up Bliss in her mail, right, Chuck? I think let's skip listener mail. Okay.

Hoover Dam doesn't get two listener mails. Okay, fine. I was just, it was getting a little ambitious. Well, in the meantime, if you want to drop us a line, you can go to stuffyoushouldknow.com and check out our social links. You can check me out on the joshclarkway.com, and you can send me, Chuck, Jerry,

and everyone involved in Stuff You Should Know in email. Two, Stuff Podcast at iHeartRadio.com. Stuff You Should Know is a production of iHeartRadio's How Stuff Works. For more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app. Apple podcasts are wherever you listen to your favorite shows.

On the podcast, Hey Dude, the 90s called, David Lasher and Christine Taylor, stars of the cult classic show, Hey Dude, bring you back to the days of slip dresses and choker necklaces. We're gonna use Hey Dude as our jumping off point, but we are going to unpack and dive back into the decade of the 90s.

We lived it, and now we're calling on all of our friends to come back and relive it. Listen to Hey Dude, the 90s called on the iHeartRadio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Bye, bye, bye. Listen to Frosted Tips with Lance Bass on the iHeartRadio app, Apple podcasts,

or wherever you listen to podcasts.