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

Episode Date: April 18, 2019

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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 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. Do you ever think to yourself, what advice would Lance Bass

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Listen to Frosted Tips with Lance Bass on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts. Hey everybody, this is Chuck. Hello, New York specifically. I'm coming out there next week, next Tuesday, to perform as a part of the We Knows Parenting podcast. My buddies Beth Newell and Pete McNerney.

Pete, he's Peter, what am I talking about? They are performing live, We Knows Parenting for the first time at Little Fields in Brooklyn on Tuesday night, the 23rd. And I'm gonna be there, I'm coming up for this. I'm gonna take the stage with them, I'm gonna talk kids, and it's a good chance to say hi. Emily's gonna be there too, everyone.

So come on out, if you are in the New York area, Tuesday the 23rd, that's this Tuesday at Little Fields in Brooklyn. Go to weknowsparenting.com and buy tickets there. And I would love to meet you. So come on out and say hello. Welcome to Step You Should Know, a production of iHeartRadio's How Stuff Works.

Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark, there's Charles Sevillichuk, Brian, there's Jerry over there, and this is part due, the sequel of Hoover Dam. Let's find out what happens. So, I think the last thing I said was, they poured the last bucket of concrete on May 29th, 1935. And the end, so let's do listener mail.

Okay, nice, I'm kidding. Definitely worth the two part. Okay, Chuck, so they poured the last bucket of concrete, they grouted everything off, and all of a sudden you now have one solid sheet of dam, Hoover Dam, and at the bottom, it's much, much wider than it is at the top. It's like 600 plus feet at the bottom,

that's how wide it is. At the top, it's 45 feet, which still feels substantial. And indeed, it's enough to have a two lane highway going over it. And for a very long time, for 60 something years, I believe, that was how you got from Arizona to Las Vegas, you had to drive over the Hoover Dam on top of it, which seems just about as boneheaded as it gets.

But I guess they really wanted the gift shop money from everybody they could get their hands on. Yeah, it was kinda cool to have been forced to do that, because whether you liked it or not, you were gonna see an amazing thing. But eventually, like you were hinting at, traffic just picked up and picked up, and they were like, you know what,

this isn't great to have all these cars driving over this thing every day. So let's build a bridge, you know what we'll do? Let's build the longest concrete gravity arch bridge in North America. Which is appropriate, because again, if you take a gravity arch bridge and lay it on its side, you've got basically the Hoover Dam right there.

Yeah, so it spans over 1,000 feet, about 1,060 feet of the Black Canyon, just south of the old route, 900 feet above the canyon. Have you been to this bridge? Yeah, it's cool, like I have driven over that bridge since I visited the dam itself in 96, and you get a great view from up there. Yes, you do, you also get to experience

the most terror you can possibly experience on a bridge, because the railing is like less than five feet tall. There's no big barrier, there's no nuts, there's no nothing, it's just void right on the other side. It's so scary, but yes, the view is unparalleled. I don't think you can walk across it though, can you? Yes. You can?

Yes. I had no idea. Oh yeah, no, there's a pedestrian walkway. Oh really? And the railing is less than five feet tall. Oh okay, I didn't notice that. Oh yeah, that's why you weren't terrified. You walk across this thing and it is so scary.

Oh my gosh, it's scary, but it's really, really amazing. Like the most amazing views of Hoover Dam prior to the bridge opening were all done, like from about this vantage point by helicopter, now any smoke can just walk out there, just park and walk and see it yourself. And it's pretty amazing, you see all sorts of rainbows, we saw a bunch of rainbows over there

because the water's flowing out of the dam outlets and the sun's shining and there's just rainbows, like you can't throw a rock and not hit a rainbow around there. Well, Bob Mould would end up writing a great song after being inspired by a visit there. The rainbow connection? No, Bob Mould, and you remember Sugar?

Sure, and Husker Dew. Yeah, but Sugar was his band in the early 90s and he had a great song called Hoover Dam. I didn't know that. Standing on the edge of the Hoover Dam. That is such a good Bob Mould. So March 1st, 1936, believe it or not, they finished this thing under budget

two years ahead of schedule. Yeah, I wanna say something about that real quick. Remember they called Frank Crow, the guy who was running, he was the project manager for the whole thing? A little slow Crow? They called him Hurry Up Crow. Oh, that's right. So he made the company $8 million.

Remember how they bid the thing out at just 24 grand over cost? By coming in under budget and that early, they saved $8 million. So he was quite the hero for the corporate overlords. All slow money bags, Crow. So finally, the moment comes, and I can't imagine what this must have been like,

but they were able to release that Colorado River that had been on hold, well, not on hold, but flowing in a different place. All those years, back into that original route, and all of a sudden you have Lake Mead, the Lake Mead Reservoir, it is 110 miles stretching, 110 miles upstream from the Hoover Dam

and attracts 10 million people a year to waterski, and sun, and boat, and do fun things. Yeah, because again, it was designated as the nation's first national recreation area. Recreation? Recreation, recreation. It's the biggest reservoir in the world, and... Which is saying something,

because there's some gigantore reservoirs out there. Yeah, this one is 1.24 trillion cubic feet. So there's so much water in there, Chuck, that they measure it by acre feet, which is how much water it takes to flood an acre, a square acre of land, and there's something like 28 million acre feet in Lake Mead at its capacity.

Amazing. That's a lot of flooded acres. As a matter of fact, it's like 28 million square flooded acres of water right there. That's a lot of water. Yeah, and Lake Mead aside, we should probably go over some of the stats for Hoover Dam itself, because it's done now.

It's the, at the time, was the tallest dam in the world by more than 300 feet, 726 feet from the canyon floor, and now it is the second tallest, still second tallest concrete gravity dam in the United States behind the Oroville Dam in California, which I don't know if you looked at that, but it's no Hoover Dam. Oh, is it shrubby?

Yeah, I mean, it's fine. It looks like a big giant slip and slide. It's got this huge ramp. Oh, it sounds kind of fun. Yeah, it's fun, but again, Bob Mould didn't write a song called The Oroville Dam. Can I hear a little snippet of it if you had? No, no, no, no, no.

Just play the first one again, and I'll do this. Oroville! That's so good. Today, Hoover Dam is still second in the country in power production and ranks 11th in the world in power production. It's second in the country still?

For power, yeah, for power production. Wow, that's crazy. And it was the biggest until 1949 when the Grand Coulee hydroelectric dam on the Columbia River in Washington state took it over. Right, right, and there's still one and two, I guess, then, is the thing. That's right.

But what's crazy is so the hydroelectric power from the Hoover Dam generates like 4 billion kilowatt hours annually. Yeah, let's talk about that. You're like, okay, that must be enough to power the entire US. That's actually not the case at all. It's about, I believe, a quarter or a fifth

of the annual power consumption of just Los Angeles County. Just Los Angeles. It's about a fifth of it. But that's only County. Sure, and it is having a significant impact. I read that if they stopped producing electricity at the Hoover Dam, everyone in California

and the Southwest power bills would go up by like 20 to $40 a month. That's pretty substantial. But it's still, I guess I'm saying like I'm surprised it's the number two guy on the block still. Yeah, the way they distribute it too is California gets about almost 50% of the power. Nevada, Nevada, they both get 23%

and then Arizona gets about close to 19%. Did they split that 23%? Yeah, Nevada, Nevada. Yeah. Yeah, but that's only 53 or 50, 73. That's still not, I wonder if the rest, where the rest goes? Downstream.

The power? Yeah, well, so you're talking about the power or the water? The power. Oh, I don't know. Because that's not 100%. I wonder how much of that operates the dam itself. Can't be that much. I mean, that's a lot left over.

I'm not sure. Yeah, I'm not really sure. So regardless of where that phantom electricity goes, Chuck, I wanna talk about another extraordinarily foresightful part of this project. Do you remember when they diverted the river in those four tunnels around the dam project site? No, what are you talking about?

Well, let's go back here. We'll go back and replay the entire episode real quick and they'll be in there somewhere. Yeah, sure. So they diverted the river so they could build the dam. And they saved those tunnels. They didn't just like cover them up and say,

forget you, we don't need you anymore. They said, no, no, no. We can actually use you in the future. So one on each side is now called the penstock. It's a, they've been encased in steel and then narrowed from 50 feet to 30 feet in diameter, which is still pretty substantial. And they use those to send water from Lake Mead

to the power station turbines on either side, the Nevada side and the Arizona side. And that's where the hydroelectric power is generated. So they use the diversion tunnels to generate the hydroelectric power now. Yeah, it's amazing. I love it. The water falls into these things,

go down about 500 feet into this power station, which by the way, part of the tour is you get to go down into the bowels. Oh, we missed that. Which is kind of neat. Yeah, you didn't, the word bowels just turned you off. So that's why I did the omits for it. So it falls about 500 feet into the power station.

It's flowing here at about 2,000 cubic feet, between 2 and 3,000 cubic feet per second. And anyone who knows what hydroelectric power means, all you're doing is using that water to spin a turbine and connect that to a power generator. And all of a sudden, Arizona, Nevada and California are getting juice. Right, which is pretty ingenious

because if you think about it, when that water is flowing from Lake Mead down these penstocks to the turbines, they're not using any pumps or anything like that. It's all just gravity, sending it over like a 600 feet drop. And what did you say it was like a 2,000 to 3,000 cubic feet per second.

Cubic feet per second. So that, Chuck, is a lot of water. That is a tremendous amount of water. So much so that converted into Big Macs per second. You're talking 89,367 Big Macs per second if you're moving water at 2,000 cubic feet per second. And that's actually accurate based on the dimensions of Big Mac.

I did the calculations. Really? That's how many Big Macs would be flying past you in a second if it were Big Macs instead of water they were sending down there. The other stat which staggers me and because I was thinking like, there's no way Julia actually figured out the horsepower

of this whole thing. And she did, well, she found someone who did. And this thing can crank out almost 3 million horsepower combined. Wow. Is that electric system? 3 million horsepower? I know that's a lot of horsepower

but I'm just trying to like put it in other terms. Like how many trains is that? Well, just think about standing in the middle of a desert and seeing 3 million horses charging at you. That's a lot of horsepower. That's a lot of horses. It is. So the way that the water gets from Lake Mead

down to the turbines, I mean, it's all very much controlled and the way they control it is if you ever go to the Hoover Dam, just on the Lake Mead side of the dam, there are these four towers that rise out of the water and those towers have gates that can be opened and closed to let water in. And those are the gates that let the water in

that send it to the penstocks down to power the turbines in the power stations. Apparently to the tune of 3 million horsepower. Amazing. It is amazing. Again, all of this, if you step back and just kind of look at it as a kid, you're like, yeah, put a hole here

to make the water go there, to make that turbine spin. It's really simple in a lot of ways, but the amount of ingeniousness it took to actually execute it, that's where the chef's kiss lies. All right, let's take a break here and we're gonna come back and talk about spillways right after this. On the podcast, HeyDude, the 90s called David Lasher and Christine Taylor,

stars of the cult classic show, HeyDude, bring you back to the days of slip dresses and choker necklaces. We're gonna use HeyDude 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. It's a podcast packed with interviews,

co-stars, friends, and non-stop 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? Also 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 HeyDude, 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, OK, 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? If you do, you've come to the right place,

because I'm here to help. This, I promise you. Oh, god. Seriously, I swear. And you won't have to send an SOS, because I'll be there for you. Oh, man. And so will 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. 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, ya 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 Podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts. All right, Chuck. So they used two of the four diversion tunnels to feed the turbines to generate hydroelectric power. That leaves two other ones. And I know they didn't just forget about those.

What are they using those for? Go. And this is sort of the final component here, because what they had to do was, I mean, when this thing is working great, which it almost always has, we'll get to that in a second, everything's awesome. People are getting power. People are water skiing on Lake Mead.

People are getting water. Crops are getting water. Cows are drinking water. Everybody's happy. But they did have to think about the fact that the Colorado River used to be quite a bear and may get angry again one day. Or this thing may fail one day.

So we need to think about what happens if something does go wrong, whether it's a flood or the system breaks down or something. So they thought ahead and they set up what were called spillways. They can actually divert, once again, all that water into those two outer tunnels that are now referred to as spillways, but this is downstream.

Right, right. So not the upstream tunnels that are being used for the fliberty gibbets. Have you ever seen a fish ladder? Surely you have. Oh yeah. I think we've even talked about them on something before. Those are great.

Yeah, that's basically like an upstream spillway. Yeah. Okay, so this is the opposite, that's sending it down. And it's the exact same principle and almost the exact same design as that little overflow hole that you have in your sink. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So like you can't flood your bathroom

because eventually if that water level hits that hole, it's just gonna go into the hole and down the drain. Anyway, this is the exact same thing. So they utilize those remaining two diversion tunnels as these spillways and they didn't lower them at all. Remember they reduced the other ones to like 30 feet from 50 feet. These are still 50 foot spillways lined

with like three feet of concrete. But they follow very similar trajectories where the water hits a certain level on like a flood or whatever and it goes through these spillways and then it drops several hundred feet, I think 600 feet, which is a lot for a lot of water to drop. It starts to pick up a pretty high velocity

and then it all spills out of these gates a little further downstream beyond the hydroelectric plants and everybody's saved and happy and nothing, no water's ever meant to go over the top of the Hoover Dam. If that ever happened, that would be colossally bad. It's never designed to do that. It probably never will do that. Even if humans suddenly just vanish overnight,

the spillways would probably still work. But that's what it's designed for. It's designed to just get rid of that water and reroute it. Basically, like they rerouted the Colorado River, but this time they're rerouting it around the power stations which would be swamped with that much water. Yeah, and they don't let, it's not like they were like, all right, if this gets within like three or four feet,

we're gonna take action. If it gets to within, they set it at 27 feet. So if the water rises for any reason to within that 27 feet to the top of where those cars are driving, those spillway gates open up and it diverts that water and the dam is not able to breach, which like you said, would be catastrophic.

It lets out a big hooray. And the good news is the system, that outlet system has never failed and it's only had to been used twice, once for the test in 1941. And then in 1983, there was actually a flood that got within, that caused that river to go up within 27 feet.

And they opened up that spillway, which I imagine there was, I mean, it was probably kind of scary, but there were probably some engineers that were pretty excited to get to use those spillways, finally. Yeah, because they, I mean, you would have had to have been an old timer

to have been there for the 1941 test, by the time 1983 came around. So I'm sure all these people wanted to see this because they'd never seen it work before. And they also wanted to know if it did work and it definitely worked. I mean, it wasn't a drill like 1941. It was a straight up flood.

Like this is what it was designed for and it worked just fine. Yeah, but both times during the test and during that flood, those spillways suffered some damage. So let's talk about the failures that have happened over the years. Right. So in those first few years,

when everyone was still kind of biting their nails a little bit, there were a couple of problems. Air bubbles formed in these spillways and seepage, like water started seeping under the base of the dam, which is not good at all. No, and those are actually two different things. So both, we'll start with the air bubbles, right? Yeah.

So that's called cavitation. And when the spillways were used, both in that 1941 test and in the 1983 actual flood when that water, the huge, huge amounts of water fell, you know, 600 feet down to the elbow of the spillway that led it the rest of the way out to the river. When it hit, when it impacted, by that time, these things called cavitations,

little like bubbles of vapor had formed in the water column. And these things were so strong that when they collapsed, they had enough force that they could like shatter concrete. So when the spill test was done, the spillway test, and then when the flood was over and the spillways were turned off, they went and investigated, there were huge chunks of concrete missing.

The water just sheared it away like it was nothing. And the cavitation is still not really fully understood. It's part of like a really infrequent, unusual occurrence. Like water typically doesn't flow that fast on earth over, you know, a man-made structure. So it's not like something we have to worry about. But they figured out that if you insert aerators or air ducts, something to insert air into that water,

to kind of lessen the blow kind of pad or pillow, the impact of those cavitations collapsing, it can protect concrete. And so after 1941, they didn't really know what they were doing. After 1983, somebody had figured out aeration by that time. And so they installed them right afterward. And as far as I know, they haven't tested it

to see if it works, but in other places, it's been shown to work. So I think it's a pretty safe bet that if those overflow spillways have to be used again, they probably won't cavitate because of the aeration that was inserted into the spillways now. Yeah, well, I actually saw in 1941, they knew that they could do this with air ducts, but the government wouldn't pony up

for the money. Oh, is that right? Yeah, they denied the funds. And it took until that flood of 83, when it happened again, when the government was like, all right, we'll pay for this stuff. Fine. Hoover's ghost came out.

He's like, don't get involved. It's not the government's job to pay for broken concrete. So this seepage was the other sort of engineering failure. And we should, you know, we need to point out that this thing has performed really, really well. Like none of these failures broke the dam, you know? That's a really good point. And I think it's definitely worth pointing out.

Like the spillway was, those were huge, you know, wear and tear that probably shouldn't have happened and probably won't again. But yeah, the whole system still worked. Yeah, so if you have a dam like this, the stability of this whole thing relies on keeping all that water out. So any seepage under the base of that dam is not good.

It's gonna cause uplift pressure. That's gonna shift the whole foundation. And this grout basically was failing. A grout curtain is gonna prevent the seepage. So they were pressure injecting all this grout into these holes, trying to fill cavities, but it was not a hundred percent and they were getting some seepage in there.

Well, they did a really poor job of geological exploration before they ever started the project. Yeah, that was the main issue there. So like the same grout that they introduced into those cooling pipes after they were finished building the actual dam itself, they were introducing that into these holes they drilled

to kind of fill those cracks, crevices, faults, all this stuff that's in the bedrock. Because normally when the Colorado River is flowing, Chuck, it's like, it's fine. It's allowed to keep going and it doesn't try to get anywhere aside from the river bed. But when it runs into the dam, then it's got issues.

The water- It wants to go somewhere. Right, yeah. That's what water does. It wants to go somewhere. So it starts to find those little cracks and crevices and faults. And when it fills up enough of them,

it can actually lift up the dam. And that's what it was doing. It was lifting up the dam. So they went back and drilled more holes and added even more grout and basically created this barrier. So you've got the barrier that's the dam and then you have the barrier

that's this grout reinforced bedrock, hundreds of feet down into the earth. So now the water just gives up and does what it's told. Yeah, I love that they really went overboard there in an additional 300 feet underground with this grout. But imagine being like the dam is actually lifting up. It's starting to float. That is the exact opposite of what you want

to go on with your dam. Yeah, for sure. Because apparently on the face of the dam, the upstream face, the water pressing up against it, Lake Mead is over a hundred miles long. It's an enormous amount of water. And it's being held back by this one slab of concrete. And I guess I think Julia said it was like 45,000 pounds

per square feet of pressure pressing up against the dam at all times. So yeah, that's just hairy if you think about it, especially then if you start to think about that amount of concrete like being lifted up by the water and it's just basically being moved out of the way and they had to stop it in time. All right, folks, we're gonna take our last break.

We're gonna come back and finish up with part four, part two of Hoover Dam right after this. ["Hoover Dam"] On the podcast, Paydude the 90s called David Lasher and Christine Taylor stars of the co-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. It's a podcast packed with interviews, co-stars, friends and non-stop 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 vapor 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? If you do, you've come to the right place because I'm here to help. This, I promise you. Oh, God. Seriously, I swear. And you won't have to send an SOS because I'll be there for you.

Oh, man. 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 Podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts.

["South West"] All right, we're gonna bring it home here with... Or, or, we could keep talking about it forever. With a little bit on how the Hoover Dam just really changed the United States and especially the Southwest. Roosevelt, Franklin Roosevelt dedicated the dam on September 30th, 1936, and man, insult to injury,

former president Herbert Hoover was not even on the guest list to come and see that dedication. No. You imagine that? Like four years after, and he was the guy who was the first champion of the whole thing too. I mean, like it was his project for sure. Yeah.

So that area, that region, it really changed everything. Aside from Boulder City becoming a real place, which is kind of neat, and Vegas growing, the whole region was allowed to flourish because, well, one big reason is because they tamed that Colorado River. No more flooding.

Right. So no more flooding meant that you could actually have like a stable agricultural industry, right? Yeah, I think it says here, the region's crops and livestock account for 15% and 13% of the entire country's production. Yeah, and they grow so much like lettuce and cilantro and stuff that,

that region's now called America's salad bowl. It's a huge, like it has enormous amounts of production and it never would have gotten to that point had the Hoover Dam not produced like a steady reliable supply of irrigation and done away with flooding. Like there's no more, there hasn't been a single flood from the Colorado River that's affected any of the land

in the area since the Hoover Dam came online. You know, when I lived in Yuma and I waited tables at Juliana's patio cafe, there was this dude, I can't remember his name, but this one guy that would bring in a bunch of big money guys to eat every now and then, like six or eight of them for these business dinners and he was a lettuce guy.

Oh yeah, okay. And I was just thought it was so funny growing up in Atlanta, I'd never thought about it, but all he did was grow lettuce. And if he came in with his six or eight buddies, like you had to shut down and take that table only, like he expected you to only wait on your table. Right, well, there's some real lettuce in it for you.

Oh, there was. Was he a good tipper? Cause a lot of times those guys are not. Well, it was, he always had a party big enough to where the tip was included. And he would usually give you a little lettuce on top of that. That's nice.

Like a good sandwich. Like literally, here's a piece of romaine for you. It's good for you, kid. And spank you on the bottom as you're walking away. So the Hoover Dam changed everything, like places like Tucson, Arizona would not even have been allowed to happen in Las Vegas and LA booming like it did.

Thanks to the Hoover Dam, like you said, no flooding, tons of production, and everything is under control. One thing they did have to worry about, well, we'll talk about what they are worrying about now in a minute, but one thing they did worry about then, and then like in World War II, and again at 9-11, was the fact that it's a terror target.

Cause so many places rely on this for water and irrigation that if a terrorist organization took out the Hoover Dam, especially, I mean, it'd be bad anytime, but especially in World War II, it would have been catastrophic. Yeah, so I guess 1939, the Mexican government let the American embassy in Mexico City know, hey, we just heard that the Germans

are planning on bombing Hoover Dam. And America was like, what? And they put up all these new safeguards and got military police to patrol the area. They installed floodlights on Lake Mead. They put up a steel net. So you couldn't get anywhere near the dam on the Lake Mead side.

Cause remember, I mean, people are like boating and recreating on this. So they had to kind of keep people away from the dam for the first time. And, but they still kept going on. You could still go visit and everything. And then Pearl Harbor happened, and they were like dams closed,

and they closed the dam to the public for the duration of the war. I think until like the end of 1945, they finally opened it to the public again, all because of the dirty Nazis. Yeah, man. And they, they did the dam itself actually had its own police force.

The army, of course, came in there to help out as well. But it was a pretty big deal because not only are you disrupting water and maybe flooding the valley, but the power supply to Southern California, there was a lot of aviation, it still is a lot of aviation manufacturing in Southern California and for,

and I think that's what the Nazis were really after was to disrupt the power supply to the aviation industry. Yeah, because at the time, America wasn't even in World War II yet, but we were helping the British with the aviation stuff we were building. So they were trying to strike at the heart of British capabilities

by blowing up the Hoover Dam. Yeah, they were like unexpected. The Nazis want to blow up the Hoover Dam and the US is like, what did we do? We're not even in this so-called World War. Right, oh yeah, helping the British. All right, I gotcha. We're still not gonna let you do it,

but now we understand. And then of course, after 9-11, it was, there was a lot of fear that that could be a potential, and it still looms as a potential terrorist target. That was one reason why they built the bridge, the bypass bridge, which is because they're like,

this is just too vulnerable, letting people drive over it. And so from what I understand, either after the German bomb plot became evident or after 9-11, and I think it was after 9-11, until that bridge opened up, when you drove over the Hoover Dam, you had to wait and it would happen in, I guess, shifts, and you would be escorted across by the police

in groups of cars. And then you'd make your way to the other side and they'd be like, keep going, don't even look back or we'll arrest you. And then that's how you got across until they finally opened the bypass. Wow. Which must have been,

I'll bet there are a lot of delays. Yeah, probably so. In that situation. So the current threat, aside from that looming terror threat, is the fact that there have been about 16 years of drought in that area, and it's scary, man.

Lake Mead is not the same. I mean, it is, what, at like 150 feet lower than it used to be? Than it was in 2000. Yeah, 130 feet. I mean, that's a huge, huge drop. Yeah, there's like a bathtub ring high water mark now. Oh yeah.

Just the discoloration along the canyon walls, where you can see where it used to be, and it's really significant. And the problem is, is when they built the dam, they built it so that the gates that allow water down to the penstocks to the hydroelectric plant, they cut off at a certain height.

After that, the water's too low to flow through the gates, and then you have no hydroelectric power. Same thing with the pipes that pump water out to Las Vegas and Los Angeles and Tucson and everywhere else that gets water. They're at a certain height too. So once the, I think once the water level hits like 895 feet, there's no more water that can be drawn out.

And they actually got around this by creating a new low level pumping system to where they came in and went under the under Lake Mead and tapped into it. And now just like a bathtub drain at the bottom of a bathtub, there's a pumping station. So that now they're not like, okay, we have 895 feet of water,

we can't get to drink from any longer. Now they're like, no, we can get to all the water we need to for drinking, which is a huge relief. That's a big, big deal that they were able to do this. But at the same time, everyone's still very much aware that they're like, we still have issues. Like we're losing water through evaporation and from lower and lower snow accumulations

up in the Rockies, where all this water comes from in the first place. Like there's a big problem with climate change and it's having an enormous impact on Lake Mead. And because all these areas depend on it for electricity and water, everybody's really freaked out right now. Yeah, so the current proposition

is the LA Department of Water and Power, they have something on the table that is basically like a loop, a cycled loop system. They said, why don't we do a return path for that water, put a huge pump station, solar powered pump station downstream that's gonna then send water and cycle it back up to the reservoir. And not only that, I mean, it's a pretty good idea.

Not only that, you could enable more power generation and also create a reserve of electricity for peak periods. So then all of a sudden the Hoover Dam is like a big battery, essentially, run by solar power. Right, which sounds great. It's like, oh, okay, yeah, why just let all that water go when you're just generating hydroelectricity from it?

Put it back. But all the people who depend on that water downstream say, we still need that water, you can't pump it back into Lake Mead, we need that stuff, like that's our water. And that's part of the problem with it, Chuck, is that there's so many people who depend on this, not just from Hoover Dam,

but there's like multiple dams above Hoover Dam too. So there's a lot of people drawing water for all sorts of different purposes from the Colorado River, that there's just, it seems to be too many, there's just too many people, there's too much need. And when you toss in climate change and the impact that the 16 or 19 year drought is having,

it's a really precarious position right now that they have not figured out. Yeah, pretty scary, man. It is scary for sure. I got nothing else. That is surprising, because there is a lot to talk about. I've got one more thing.

All right. So you said that FDR dedicated the place in 1938, right? Is that what it said? I believe that's what you said. Everybody? Yeah, that's what you said. So there is a sculptor named Oscar J.W. Hansen. And you know the winged art deco giant figures,

the statues that are there on site. So he created those. And did you notice the terrazzo floor, the apron that's in front of those statues? I don't remember. It's been a while. So there are these two giant art deco statues. They look kind of like the Oscar award,

but with wings and they're seated. And they're there to just basically commemorate this conquering of humanity over nature. But on the ground in terrazzo is a star map. And it shows the exact position of the stars in the sky on that day in 1938 when Hoover Dam was dedicated so that future generations to come, even if there's like no more Americans

and no one speaks English anymore and this whole area has been abandoned, they could come back and find the Hoover Dam and the star map and calculate the exact day that it was dedicated just based on the position of the stars in this terrazzo floor. Wow. Isn't that neat?

That's amazing. Extra little touch there. Learn that on the self-guided tour, by the way. Oh yeah? Yep. Nice. If you want to know more about the Hoover Dam, go. Go to the Hoover Dam.

We can talk about it all day long. We could talk about it for two more episodes and it still wouldn't get across what it's like to be there. And since I said that, it's time for Listener Mail. I'm gonna call this, well, we got something wrong in Desert Survival, which by the way, we got a lot of kudos that that perhaps may be our funniest episode.

That was great. That was a lot of fun. Yeah, we were being silly that day. Those are always good. Hey guys, been an Abbey Listener for years, can't thank you enough for the countless hours of entertainment. Despite all the great topics in education,

I've never been tempted to write until today. During your Desert Survival opening an immediate and hilariously enjoyable left turn tangent, Chuck, you mentioned your tribute to Annie with a reference to Food Glorious Food. I feel so dumb. That song is actually from Oliver, which I know. I know that.

Everybody knows you know that. I know Annie and I know Oliver. Sure. Maybe they were friends. Can I have some more Please Daddy War books? Right? I'm at the Famous Line. I think that's it, that's the big line.

He said, I thought you might get a kick out of how I know this to be true. When I was about eight or nine, my hometown did a community production of Oliver and I was cast. What part did you play, you may ask? Well, in the song, Food Glorious Food, there's a line that goes,

food, glorious food, peas, puddings and save lois. What next is the question, rich gentleman habit boys, indigestion? At the singing of indigestion, my role and shining moment of the performance was to lean over while the tuba in the orchestra pit let out a deep and juicy note. Yes, that's right everyone.

I was in the credits as the flatulent orphan. Do you get that? He bends over and the tuba goes, huh, I got it. Needless to say guys, my life peaked early. I will always be remembered for that song. Thanks for all you do. That is Eddie in Denver, Colorado.

Eddie, that was a fantastic listener mail. Good one. Like award-winning maybe. Yeah man, I mean, if you're talking tuba farts, you've got my heart. Yep, you Eddie just got the Hoover Dam award for listener mails. The current Hoover Dam award holder. So thanks for that.

Good one. If you want to get in touch with us, you can go to stuffyoushouldknow.com. All of our social links are on there. Or you can just send us an email. Send it off to stuffpodcastatihartradio.com. Stuff You Should Know is a production of iHeartRadio's How Stuff Works.

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