- [Narrator] It brings water to over 25 million people.
It's more massive than the Great Pyramid.
With enough concrete to circle the equator
and required a city of 5,000 men to build.
(dramatic music)
It's the Hoover Dam. (dramatic music)
- The Hoover Dam would be the tallest dam ever made.
And it was of vital national importance.
- Hoover Dam really created the West as we know it today.
- [Narrator] But before it was built,
the west is dry, its cities small,
and the powerful river
that carved the Grand Canyon wreaks havoc.
- It's a wild beast.
It's unpredictable.
It has its own will.
It's like God!
- [Narrator] One man's quest to harness its power
seems unattainable.
- Just the scale is tremendous.
- This project is basically impossible.
- [Narrator] He will test the limits of engineering.
- I'm doing it as fast as humanly possible.
- Crowe's plan is to refrigerate the dam
from inside out.
- [Narrator] And survival. (suspenseful music)
- He was obsessive and compulsive about the job.
And that obsessive compulsion costs lives.
- Men were dying of dehydration.
They could be hit my falling rocks,
blown up by explosions.
(explosions booming)
- [Narrator] With millions at stake,
to overcome nature.
- He is a engineering genius.
He has the ability to bend rivers to his will.
- We need results.
- He was willing to push everybody to the limit
to get it done.
- [Narrator] And build the American West.
- In terms of if he's a hero or a villain,
he was definitely both.
- [Narrator] This is the story of the Hoover Dam.
(dramatic music)
(wind whooshing)
(dramatic music)
- [Narrator] The dawn of the 20th century
and the U.S. Census Bureau
has declared the American West is no longer a frontier.
(dramatic music)
Most of the Western territories
have officially become states.
- The American West.
It looms large in the American imagination
as this incredible natural environment.
It also looms really large as a place of new beginnings.
If life has gotten you down, head west,
because you can reinvent yourself.
- [Narrator] But the West is still wild.
(horse whinnies)
For settlers, one of the hardships they face
is the inability to control one essential resource.
- The story of civilization in the American West
is a story of finding and managing water.
(dramatic music)
The area as a whole is very arid.
So the rivers are vital for farming.
At the same time in the spring, those rivers flood.
And they can wipe out those farms
and those towns and those crops.
(dramatic music)
- [Narrator] It's either too little water or way too much.
- From the earliest days,
farmers tried to save what they saw as excess runoff water
in the spring when the rivers are overflowing
to use on their farms during the drier season.
They would make their own little ad hoc irrigation systems,
or little reservoirs and dams.
- They were small-scale projects
that really didn't have a tremendous impact
beyond their immediate region.
- [Narrator] For the West to flourish,
America needs to conquer its biggest waterways.
For that, they'll need to engineer large-scale dams.
(dramatic music)
- The idea of using a dam to control the river
means you create a basin that fills up.
(dramatic music)
- [Narrator] Behind the dam,
an artificial lake or reservoir is formed.
Whenever the river flow surges,
the reservoir is able to contain the excess water.
- When the river is in flood stage,
instead of overflowing the banks,
it just fills that reservoir up a little deeper upstream.
- Dams and their reservoirs are also a huge source of water
that can be sent by canal or pipes
to where it's needed.
To create farmland out of desert,
to provide more drinking water to cities.
For the West to have the water and food it needs to grow,
(dramatic music)
it needs large-scale dams.
- [Narrator] But at the turn of the century.
- [Narrator] Those dams don't exist.
(dramatic music)
- There's this idea that maybe we could get
the federal government to finance
these large-scale dam projects.
- [Narrator] And in 1902,
President Theodore Roosevelt pushes through
the Reclamation Act,
which will provide funding and oversight
of new irrigation projects.
- President Roosevelt and others felt that there was a need
for the federal government to control those waterways
and to tap them for their potential.
- [Narrator] The dams and reservoirs they need
will be built by the newly-formed
United States Bureau of Reclamation.
Within five years,
they begin building dams on some Western rivers.
But in Idaho,
one bureau engineer is obsessed
with finding a better process.
And one day building the biggest in the world.
(dramatic music)
- Frank Crowe is the most experienced dam builder
in the entire United States.
He had a way of appearing on the work site
at almost any hour.
Crowe had the nickname "Hurry Up" Crowe.
He wasn't known for sentimentality.
- [Frank] What are you waiting for?
- Jif whistle.
- I can't help you with that.
But why don't you go collect your pay
and get off my site?
- What he was known for was dedication to completing the job
that he was hired to do.
The job came first.
(truck rumbling)
- Frank Crowe is born in Canada in Quebec.
His family moves to Massachusetts
and he studies engineering at the University of Maine.
He skips graduation in order to go and work
for the Bureau of Reclamation because he was passionate.
He has found his calling.
This is what he wanted to do.
- He was involved in dam works all over the West.
But unlike the pencil pushers,
Frank Crowe was out in the field,
working down in the muck with all of these men
who were working.
So he might be their boss, but he was one of them.
(suspenseful music)
- [Narrator] While his career has been successful,
his personal life has been anything but.
In 1911, he loses his first wife and unborn child
to a pregnancy-related infection.
Three years later,
he loses another child with his second wife.
(dramatic music)
- Every single time,
it seems as though he just pulls away
from connecting to people and connects to things
that he can't lose.
And he can't lose the dam.
That is permanent.
So he puts his energy into things
that aren't going to crush his heart.
(dramatic music)
- [Narrator] In 1915, Crowe finishes Idaho's Arrowrock Dam.
Which, at the time at 350 feet,
is the tallest dam ever built.
(suspenseful music) (water whooshing)
He's hopeful that his next big project
will be the one he's dreamed about for a decade.
(dramatic music)
It would control one of the longest rivers in North America.
Extending 1,450 miles through seven states
in the U.S. and Mexico.
Its powerful currents carved the Grand Canyon.
The mighty Colorado River.
- The Colorado River in its natural state
is one of the most dangerous rivers in the world.
It can go from being a calm stream
to a violently shifting flooding river
in the course of just a few hours.
- When the Colorado River flooded,
these were massive floods.
If you've ever been to the Grand Canyon,
here is this mile-deep canyon carved
just by the force of that water.
(dramatic music)
- It's a wild beast.
It's unpredictable.
It has no boss.
It has its own will.
It's like God.
- [Narrator] Because of the extreme volume
of the Colorado River's floods,
initial plans call for the world's first mega dam.
When completed, the Hoover Dam will be twice as tall
as any before it.
It will create the world's largest artificial lake,
containing enough water
to cover the state of Connecticut 10 feet deep.
Its water supply will turn the Sonoran Desert into farmland
and make possible the metropolises
of Los Angeles, Las Vegas, and Phoenix.
(dramatic music)
- Just the scale is tremendous.
It would use more material
than the biggest Egyptian pyramids.
It was just huge.
- No engineering marvel,
certainly not of this size and scale,
had ever been attempted.
There were thoughts about
whether it even should be attempted,
given the potential risks.
(suspenseful music)
- [Narrator] Engineers with the Bureau of Reclamation
start by zeroing in on the location for their mega dam,
a narrow stretch of canyon on the Arizona-Nevada border
named Black Canyon.
(suspenseful music)
- In the early days of planning
for a dam on the Colorado River,
Frank Crowe was anxious to have a hand in it.
That was the one that he wanted most.
- For Frank Crowe, this is the big one.
This is the biggest of all.
The dam that's like nothing else.
- [Narrator] But a job this big takes years
to get off the ground.
And just as the Colorado River dam is finally
on the cusp of approval,
the bureau drops a bomb on Frank Crowe's dreams.
(suspenseful music)
- They want to outsource all of our projects!
- Yeah, I heard.
- I can't sit here while all of our best projects
are handed over for someone else to build.
I didn't sign up for an office job!
- That presented a dilemma for Frank Crowe.
If he wanted to stay at the Reclamation Bureau,
that meant that he was going to be consigned
to desk jobs for the rest of his career.
(suspenseful music)
- It was a difficult decision for him
because his chance to have a hand
in the construction of Hoover Dam wasn't as certain.
- [Narrator] 20 years after joining the bureau,
Frank Crowe quits, taking a job
where he can still get his hands dirty.
Building dams for a private construction firm.
But on the heels of his resignation,
the dam on the Colorado River is finally approved.
(dramatic music)
(explosion booms)
The most ambitious public works project in U.S. history
(dramatic music)
is finally happening
without him.
- [Narrator] Less than a year after Congress clears the way
for the damming of the Colorado River to begin,
the stock market crash and Great Depression
bring the nation to a halt.
- At the height of the Great Depression,
15 million Americans were unemployed.
That's 1/4 of the country's workforce.
For African-Americans,
there were over 1/2 of that population
that were without jobs.
(dramatic music)
- The unemployment in this period is a tremendous blow
to the American psyche.
People don't wanna be on the public dole.
They wanna go to work.
There's a hunger for employment.
(dramatic music)
- And all eyes are on the new U.S. president,
Herbert Hoover, to fix the economy.
- President Hoover is in a pickle.
He needs to do something
and he needs to do it fast.
- Hoover talked big about over $3 billion worth
of projects coming online,
offering a way for the American public to find employment.
But none of these projects came to fruition.
- [Narrator] Large-scale public projects take years of work
before they're shovel-ready.
Unless it already has decades of engineering planning
behind it and the approval of Congress.
So Hoover sets his sights on the Colorado River dam.
- Everything was pretty much ready to go.
Herbert Hoover was also an engineer
and the project fit very well
into his efficient role for the government.
- [Narrator] Now, all it needs is a company big enough
to tackle it.
- There were many companies
that thought about bidding on the project
and bailed out because they were told
this project is basically impossible.
(suspenseful music)
- [Narrator] Frank Crowe believes he's up to the task.
But his company isn't.
- They didn't have the financial resources
to make it happen.
- [Narrator] So he devises a unique proposal.
- The only way to make it happen
would be to have more than one company involved in some way.
- [Narrator] Using his connections
from his days with the bureau,
Crowe convinces other companies to join forces.
They call the group Six Companies.
- Frank Crowe made it happen.
- [Narrator] When the Bureau of Reclamation opens
the project up for bids, there's a catch.
They want the dam finished in just seven years.
(suspenseful music)
If the winning company fails
to complete the project on time,
they'll owe the government $5 million,
the equivalent of 90 million today.
It's enough to scare off all
but the most determined dam builders.
- Frank Crowe spent right up to the night
before the bids were open
with pencil and paper in hand,
working out the last numbers.
(suspenseful music)
- [Narrator] On the morning of March 4th, 1931,
Crowe delivers Six Companies' bid
to his former colleagues at the Bureau of Reclamation.
The amount: $48,890,955.
It would be the largest contract ever issued
by the federal government
(suspenseful music)
Back at his office.
- Are we still getting calls?
- [Secretary] Yes, Mr. Crowe.
- [Narrator] All he can do is wait.
(phone rings)
- Thank you.
(dramatic music)
- [Narrator] The project goes to the Six Companies.
- He actually submitted a bid
that was within a couple of percent
of the estimate that the Reclamation Bureau's engineers
had come up with for the project.
He hit it almost completely on the nose.
- [Narrator] On March 12th, 1931,
just eight days after winning the contract.
Frank Crowe arrives at the nearest town to the dam site.
It's a tiny railroad hub of just 5,000 people
called Las Vegas.
- Las Vegas ain't much there in the 1920s.
You know, it's a stop on the railroad.
A watering hole.
- [Narrator] After checking into a motel,
Crowe heads into the desert.
30 miles southeast of town, where the dam will be built.
(suspenseful music)
Local news reports announce
the dam will employ upwards of 5,000 men.
Crowe looks to former colleague, Walker Young,
to help staff the project.
- [Walker] Good to see you again.
- Walker Young is the Reclamation
Bureau's superintendent.
So it's really his job to make sure,
not only that the dam gets built,
but then it gets built according to specifications.
- Frank, this is Leonard Blood.
He'll be in charge of hiring your crew.
- Sir.
- Everyone's looking for a job on the dam.
- He's had two and a half thousand job applications
in a week.
- Miners, farmers, ranchers, musicians.
Everybody who'd lost a job anywhere in the country
began migrating fast to Southern Nevada
because this is where they hope they could get a job.
(suspenseful music)
- [Narrator] Plans call for the building of an entire town,
Boulder City, to house the workforce and their families.
One day, it will be a fully functioning community
with movie theaters, churches, and its own hospital.
But President Hoover wants dam construction
started immediately.
- Because the dam project is accelerated,
essentially to address the Depression,
they can't get that home site build in time
to accommodate the first workers.
- [Narrator] So workers must improvise.
- Those men and their families end up living basically
on the shores of the Colorado,
in a community known as Ragtown,
which gives you a sense of how informal it was
and how hastily it's built.
(suspenseful music)
(hammer taps)
- [Narrator] With a workforce of 1,400,
construction begins in July of 1931.
Crowe must start with the most difficult aspect
of the entire project.
- If you think about it,
the biggest challenge of building a dam
is the fact that there's a river there.
(suspenseful music)
- You need the region where you're gonna build the dam
to be dry when you build it.
So you have to build a diversion tunnel
so the river can go around the region
where you're gonna build the dam temporarily
while you do the construction.
- [Narrator] The dam is being built in a stretch
of the Colorado River known as Black Canyon.
To divert the river,
Frank Crowe will need to bore over three miles of tunnels
through the canyon walls, made of hard volcanic rock.
(dramatic music)
- These are huge tunnels.
Each one of them, you're gonna have to have a bore
of 56 feet in diameter.
This is a huge project.
- [Narrator] And there's a catch.
Though the entire project has a seven-year deadline,
the government wants the tunnels completed
in just over two years
or Six Companies will face a huge financial penalty.
(suspenseful music)
- Frank Crowe had been given a deadline,
October 1st, 1933,
to get these tunnels built or be fined $3,000 a day.
So there was enormous pressure
to get these things completed. (suspenseful music)
- [Narrator] When tunneling begins,
Crowe is hit with an onslaught of issues.
- The living conditions of workers
during the first year is atrocious.
There was no running water.
There was, of course, no electricity.
Workers had to live with tarantulas, snakes.
- There were lots of accidents.
Rocks fell from the canyon
and completely smashed workers.
- [Narrator] But the biggest problem
of all might be the heat.
- In 1931, the average summer temperature
was almost 120 degrees every day.
I mean, you just imagine,
not only having to live in that,
but work in that.
- 150 hospitalizations happen that summer
from heat prostration.
And it wasn't just the men that were dropping dead
from the heat.
It was their families.
(dramatic music)
- [Narrator] The clock is ticking to complete the tunnels
and productivity is already low.
Frank Crowe's bosses at the Six Companies
are concerned he's falling behind schedule.
- I'm digging through volcanic rock.
I'm doing it as fast as humanly possible.
- Frank Crowe is under a lot of pressure
in order to meet the deadline.
(suspenseful music)
- I have a plan.
I always have a plan.
(suspenseful music)
- [Narrator] Crowe makes an audacious gamble
to speed things up.
He slashes wages.
- The men who were earning $5 a day,
suddenly were going to do other jobs on the project
that paid a dollar less.
- The reduction of the wage rate from $5 to $4
is not done out of necessity.
This was a strategy that Six Companies was using
in order to exert control over its workers,
to show their power.
- [Narrator] Almost immediately,
600 angry workers crowd together in protest.
- [Narrator] Leaving Crowe to make a move
to quell the uprising.
- Crowe's actions during the strike
have always been very perplexing.
- [Narrator] Will he crack under their demands
or feed the fire?
(suspenseful music)
(people shouting)
With just seven years
to complete the largest dam ever attempted,
600 workers decide to go on strike.
- The workers thought that Frank Crowe
would take their part because he was their boss.
He was their leader,
but he didn't actually want to give the workers
what they wanted.
- [Narrator] Crowe has a different plan.
- For every one of these guys,
I could find 10 more men to take their place.
- The last thing we need is bad press.
- I'm suspending all work indefinitely.
- So instead of a few hundred strikers,
you're locking out 1400?
- We have more job applications than the Colorado has water.
(suspenseful music)
- I think that, in his obsessive compulsive psychology,
that he felt he needed to shut down the site and start over.
And make sure that everyone that worked on the project
would be friendly to get this incredible job done.
- [Frank] What we don't need here is lazy agitators.
- [Narrator] Crowe meets with the press
to get ahead of the story.
- Frank Crowe and Six Companies
were extremely resourceful in using the press
for their own advantage.
- I'm shutting down and looking for new workers.
- Won't that put you behind schedule?
- This strike is stalling work.
If they hadn't walked out,
we'd have had electricity, lights,
and fans in the dorms by tonight.
- I think Crowe is absolutely taking advantage
of the conditions of the Great Depression.
- He knows he will never have a problem finding labor
for the dam, no matter what the conditions are.
And, in fact, no matter how low the pay is pushed.
(suspenseful music)
- [Narrator] After a six-day shutdown,
half of the striking workers agree
to the reduced wages and return.
The rest are replaced.
Construction of the diversion tunnels resumes
and Crowe must make up for lost time.
- First of all,
they're the biggest tunnels that have ever been built.
To excavate these tunnels,
the teams have to use scaffold
so they can send drillers up 56 feet high
to drill holes into which they're gonna insert explosives.
- The standard practice is to build scaffolding,
to place explosives,
and then take all that scaffolding down
before the explosion is set.
This is a very time consuming process.
- [Narrator] Desperate for a way to speed things up,
Crowe's right-hand man, Woody Williams,
proposes an unorthodox idea.
- The brilliant solution is to have scaffolding on wheels.
- Woody Williams realizes
that if he could put a scaffold on the truck bed,
you could essentially drive it up to the rock face
and then drive it away
when the time came for the detonation.
- You don't have to rebuild the scaffolding every time.
(suspenseful music)
- They called it the Williams Jumbo.
And it was a great big lumbering, weird looking thing
you think that would just fall over
the minute you tried to move it.
But it turned out to be something that really worked.
- Sometimes some of the most powerful
and most impactful technologies are actually very low tech.
- [Narrator] Using the new scaffolding on wheels
dramatically speeds up the excavation.
But using trucks in the tunnels causes its own issues.
(suspenseful music)
- There are a number of potential dangers
using gas powered trucks in unventilated tunnels.
One of the most concerning is the exhaust
from the trucks is gonna build up inside the tunnel
and you don't vent it out.
So you get carbon monoxide that may build up.
- [Narrator] Carbon monoxide poisoning
causes headaches, nausea, confusion, and possibly worse.
But it's nothing the Six Companies didn't already know.
And Nevada state inspector
has already warned them against it.
(suspenseful music) - One of his recommendations was
to stop using gasoline-powered vehicles underground
to create the diversion tunnels,
because it was illegal since 1929 in Nevada law
to operate these kinds of vehicles underground.
- [Narrator] But Six Companies
has already made a huge investment
in gas-powered vehicles.
- Six Companies wants to save money everywhere they can
on the dam site.
They don't wanna import electrical vehicles
to replace the gas-powered vehicles in the tunnels
because that will cost them $300,000
that they don't wanna spend.
- [Narrator] It's a decision with deadly consequences.
- Workers were dying because of carbon monoxide poisoning
in the construction of the diversion tunnels.
(suspenseful music)
- The attitude towards safety was very different then.
There was a sense that this project was
of vital national importance,
so they were willing to subject the workers
to a lot of risk.
- It was almost accepted, wrongfully so,
that loss of life will come
with these massive construction projects.
That was par for the course then.
- [Narrator] Frank Crowe and the Six Companies face a fine
of $50,000 a day in today's money
if they can't meet their deadline,
leaving Crowe with an impossible choice,
save money or save lives.
- [Narrator] Beginning in the early 1930s,
the nation is suffering through a painful reminder
of the importance of water.
Severe droughts have led to rich farmland
throughout the Southern Plain states drying up.
Nutrient-dense topsoil is simply blowing away.
- And this presents a problem
because if your farmland is now in the air,
you can't grow anything.
(suspenseful music) (wind whooshing)
- [Narrator] The devastation becomes known as the Dust Bowl.
- But as these farmers head West,
there has to be some kind of rerouting of water and energy
to where these so-called Oakies
are trying to find a new life.
- [Narrator] Never has the need been greater
to harness the Colorado River's water.
And when Franklin Delano Roosevelt
takes over the presidency
from Herbert Hoover in 1933,
he continues to push for the completion of the dam.
- What ends up happening is that Roosevelt repurposes
the dam project as part
of his Works Progress Administration
and makes it a signature element
in his effort to put American people back to work.
(suspenseful music)
- [Narrator] Meanwhile, Frank Crowe has been hurrying
to meet the government's deadline
for boring the Colorado River diversion tunnels.
(suspenseful music)
But there's a problem. (trucks whooshing)
- The worst injuries really occur in the tunnels.
That's where men are being poisoned by carbon monoxide.
- [Narrator] But rather than remove
the trucks emitting the deadly gas,
Six Companies presses ahead to keep pace
and sweeps the causes of death under the rug.
- Many, many people perished from inhaling carbon monoxide.
And this was documented by the Six Companies surgeon
as pneumonia or heart trouble.
- Because then it would be said
that it was a natural cause of death.
So it will not count to the final tally
of how many men died in the construction of the Hoover Dam.
- There was no way that "Hurry Up" Crowe could succeed
in hurrying up and getting this done
without taking on enormous risk.
Risk that today we would never take on.
The legacy has its good and bad tied together.
(suspenseful music)
- [Narrator] Thanks to the gas-powered scaffolding
on trucks, by the fall of 1932,
the diversion tunnels are finished
a year ahead of schedule.
(explosion booms)
(suspenseful music)
- [Narrator] And the process of diverting
the Colorado River into the tunnels begins with a bang.
- Frank Crowe set off a series of explosions
on the canyon wall
to really make a spectacle of what this event really meant.
- [Narrator] Next, Crowe's men fill the entire river
with debris, blocking its path
and forcing the water to flow into the massive tunnels.
- In some ways, building the diversion tunnels
was as big and as impressive a job
as building the dam itself.
- [Narrator] Crowe now has just 5 1/2 years
to complete the 6.6 million-ton dam.
- This is going to involve a dam,
which is almost twice the height
of any other dam that had been built prior.
Just the scale is tremendous.
- [Narrator] He must now begin removing
the old weathered rock from the canyon walls
so the dam can be anchored to clean bedrock,
otherwise it could break off and collapse.
(suspenseful music)
But removing the rock face is precarious work.
- One of the most dangerous jobs
on site is known as the high scalers.
These are daredevils.
They're acrobats without a net.
- [Michelle] High scalers would suspend themselves
from the top of the canyon rim.
- These walls are, you know, 6, 700 feet high.
- Their job is basically to clean
and smooth the canyon walls
so that they can become anchorages for the dam itself.
- Of course, this means also
you're gonna have all this rock falling.
- They could be hit by falling debris or falling rocks.
The probability of something bad happening is immense.
- [Leticia] This was not for the faint of heart.
(suspenseful music)
- [Narrator] To protect against falling debris,
workers come up with a safety innovation.
- Very early on,
some of the workers started to make
these things called hard-boiled hats.
- [Frank] Wanna show us what's going on here, fellas?
- They started dipping their hats in tar
so that it got nice and hard.
And actually it was a bit of protection.
(suspenseful music)
(indistinct)
Well done.
- [Narrator] Frank Crowe takes their idea a step further.
- Six Companies is the very first company
that commercially manufactured hard hats for their workers.
And it was something
that absolutely saved lives on the project.
- Frank Crowe is really a yin and yang.
A good and a bad.
He had to often be a little harsh.
On the other hand,
having worked down in the canyons with these men,
he understood perfectly their perspective
of, this is really hard work.
(suspenseful music)
- [Narrator] As 1932 draws to a close,
preparations begin to pour the concrete,
but the dam's massive size creates
a seemingly insurmountable hurdle.
Large amounts of concrete take longer to cool
and are likely to crack.
With five years left on the deadline,
it will require a miracle solution
because the time a solid piece of concrete
this big needs to cool?
125 years.
- [Narrator] By the spring of 1933,
Frank Crowe has five years left to complete Hoover Dam.
His biggest challenge yet, pouring the concrete,
can finally begin.
- When you look at a picture of Hoover Dam,
(dramatic music)
you know that there is so much concrete.
But really you're just seeing the face of it.
You don't really see and appreciate
how much concrete is at the base.
(dramatic music)
- [Narrator] At its crest,
the Hoover Dam will be wide enough
for a two-lane highway, U.S. 93.
But its base will be a solid mass of concrete
as wide as two football fields.
The sheer volume presents an all-new engineering challenge.
- We tend to think of concrete as pretty simple stuff.
You mix it up,
you pour it into a mold,
and it hardens and that's it.
In fact, it's chemically a complicated thing
that happens when concrete hardens.
- [Narrator] When water mixes with the cement
in concrete, it starts a chemical reaction
that generates heat.
- [Narrator] Nearly 15 degrees
for every a hundred pounds.
- Concrete is gonna give off a huge amount of heat.
If you ever gotten a cast on your arm
and the plaster sets, it gets warm.
It's like concrete.
- [Narrator] Frank Crowe will be pouring
4 1/2 million cubic yards of concrete.
Enough to lay a sidewalk four feet wide around the earth.
- Hoover Dam is going to require more concrete
than has ever been used
in all of the concrete dams
in the United States put together up to that time.
- [Narrator] If the dam were poured as one solid piece,
it's so massively thick, it would take 125 years to cool.
And the temperature difference between the hot inside
and cool outside would cause cracking.
- That was not going to happen
because Frank Crowe is, at the end of the day,
very resourceful and finds solutions.
- [Narrator] Instead, the concrete will be poured
into 215 blocks, like giant LEGO pieces.
The smaller size makes it easier for heat to escape.
To maximize cooling,
the concrete must set a little at a time.
Government engineers calculate
they can risk pouring no more than five feet every 72 hours.
- Here's where the most inspired part of the plan came in.
(dramatic music)
They realized that
they couldn't let the heat dissipate naturally.
It would take too long.
They would need to actively chill the dam.
- Crowe's plan is basically to refrigerate the dam
from inside out.
- [Narrator] At a time when only one in 10 households
even has a refrigerator,
Crowe must build the largest cooling system ever conceived.
- They designed a system to run steel pipes
through every single one of these blocks
that they were gonna pour.
The pipes were all connected
to a gigantic refrigeration plant.
If that plant had been designed
just to make ice like for people's cocktails,
it would have been able
to make a thousand tons of ice a day.
Instead, it chilled water that ran through these steel pipes
through the whole dam.
As they built it up, they added more pipe.
(suspenseful music)
- [Narrator] But the process adds time
to an already complicated build.
- [Narrator] And the government is watching.
- I'll remind you again of the contract.
No more than five feet of concrete
on any single block in 72 hours!
- I know the rules.
And I'll still stay ahead of schedule.
- [Narrator] To finish in five years
and avoid owing the government millions in late penalties.
- [Narrator] Frank Crowe gambles on a bold new method
to pour concrete faster than has ever been done before.
(dramatic music)
(suspenseful music)
- [Narrator] It's 1934 and Frank Crowe
has just four years to finish construction.
He's staked Six Companies' profits
on his ability to save time in pouring concrete
by using an unproven method.
- There are two individual concrete plants
on the dam site itself.
They produce concrete that's poured from the plants,
directly into buckets that are carried over to the dam site
by a network of cables that Crowe essentially
has invented all by himself.
- Crowe's idea was something he'd used before
on some of these previous large dams that he'd built.
But on this dam,
he had to do it on a massively greater scale.
- [Narrator] Using the cable way,
the buckets of concrete glide down into the canyon,
going directly to where they're needed,
where they dump their load. (suspenseful music)
- That innovation sped up the process
of pouring concrete probably by a factor of five or 10,
because it became unnecessary
to move the concrete into trucks.
And it showed Crowe's thinking that,
to get this thing done,
they needed to do everything on a larger,
more industrial scale.
- [Frank] We're moving quickly,
but I think we can still go faster.
- I'm gonna hand out bonuses
to the shift that moves the most concrete.
Get everyone's competitive nature riled up.
- This is where I think, you know,
Crowe's ability as a constructor
really come to the foreground.
It was incredibly successful. (suspenseful music)
- [Narrator] On February 21st, 1935,
four years after Frank Crowe arrived in Nevada,
(suspenseful music)
the last bucket of concrete is poured.
(suspenseful music)
- The Hoover Dam is definitely one
of the greatest all-time engineering achievements.
There are many innovations
that had never been previously seen in dam construction.
Like incorporating a cooling system.
And so it blazed the way for future engineers.
(suspenseful music)
- I'm here to celebrate the completion
of the greatest dam in the world.
(crowd cheering)
- [Narrator] President Roosevelt dedicates the dam
on September 30th, 1935.
Frank Crowe has finished two years ahead of schedule.
For this astounding feat,
Six Companies awards him a bonus
of 7 million in today's dollars.
- In terms of if he's a hero or a villain,
he was definitely both.
On one end, he is a engineering genius.
He has the ability to bend rivers to his will.
That being said,
he was obsessive and compulsive about the job.
And that obsessive compulsion cost lives.
(suspenseful music)
- [Narrator] Officially there were 96 industrial fatalities
in the building of the Hoover Dam.
How many more died of heatstroke
and carbon monoxide poisoning will never be known.
But, as a result, worker safety begins to improve.
- This was a huge watershed moment
that began to show that employers needed
to prioritize worker health
because it was financially something they had to do.
And health and safety is gradually seen as something
that needs to be adhered to throughout the 1930s,
throughout the New Deal,
and into World War II.
- When it was completed,
the Hoover Dam would be the tallest dam ever built,
damming up the greatest reservoir ever made.
It's also a thing of beauty.
It's kind of our idea of what a dam should look like.
That beautiful white concrete
just plugging that narrow canyon.
- Took a lot of money to build,
but thankfully, because it also produces electricity,
it has paid for itself.
By 1987, it was fully paid off
and now pays for its own maintenance.
It's a self-sustaining engineering marvel.
- [Narrator] Hoover Dam radically transforms
the American Southwest.
Its flood control and irrigation create
some of America's biggest farms where once was desert.
Its water and electricity gives cities
like Los Angeles, Las Vegas, and Phoenix
the resources to grow to what they are today.
In Las Vegas alone,
the population quintuples in just 20 years.
(dramatic music)
- This is a project that's constructed
in the middle of the Great Depression
at a time when people are questioning America.
Really gives a sense to Americans
that yes they can, in fact,
put their nose to the grindstone and accomplish things.
That they still have it within them to be builders.
(dramatic music)