Welcome to Stuff You Should Know, a production of My Heart Radios How Stuff Works. Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark, Who's Charles Chuck Bryant, And there's Jerry Roland over there. And if you put all three of us together you get a little something called Stuff you Should Know. Oh, Man, Damn, Hoover Damn edition. Have you ever been to Hoover Damn? I have been there twice show. Yeah I went. Um, I went in Oh the great Hoover Damn Tour of it was either or Man, it may have been nine. Almost cussed right then? Yeah, I heard that. I almost did that the other day to getting to a movie crushy. Um. It may have been eighty nine or ninety. It was when I went out to visit my brother when he lived in l A. And we met in Las Vegas, drove down to the Hoover dam and then back to l A. The first time you guys met, Yeah, it was great. Uh. And then I went again in ninety six for sure, ninety six and okay, I think both times I took the tour. Uh. And it's have you ever been? It's really something else. Yeah, for the first time you me and I went about a year ago. Um, we drove from uh 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 Damn, Vegas is kind of how it goes. Yeah, and you know, we'll get to the water levels. But it's uh, 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 two thousand. From what I understand, it's like a different, different place. But the damn 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 how Stuff Works dot com back when we were uh still associated with that website. I think she might still write for him occasionally. 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. Late's no, because that sounds like she's not tardy. Oh yeah, that's right. Um, 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 masters 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 the little the little area of the southwestern 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, Um. 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 s o l because while they're 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 it was called the Boulder Boulder Dam just Bold Boulder once, not two Boulders, the Boulder Dam project. Um, 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 meat, that's right. And um, this idea was conceived, this concrete gravity arch hydro electric dam, hydro electric almost almost high dough electric. Excuse me. Uh, this was all conceived because well, for three reasons plus a cherry on top. One is that the Colorado River had a had a bad habit of flooding and causing lots of devastation. Just a nasty boy, so too to lasso that that beast. Uh. Number Two, to create water in times of drought, as you know, creating a big reservoir that would be like mead uh, to create energy. I love things that kill all these birds, you know, so many dead birds. Uh. 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 like me tourism is huge. Yeah, I think like Mead was the first nationally designated recreation area. 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 fund zone. So um yeah, the first one. I think there's like this. This is the nineteen twenties, I think when the project is really starting to gain steam and the guy who was this Secretary of Commerce at the time, who 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 than it is. It wants to be cropland, it wants to be cattle pasture. It wants to be a big old city like l A or Vegas. They're just waiting to pop, but they really are having trouble with water and with flooding. Like it's it's weird. It's like the Colorado River would be like not enough, sorry, and then up 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 that river. And you know, 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. Um, it was successful as far as damn projects go. Yeah, And just to clear something up when you just said Herbert Hoover said big cities like l A and Vegas, he had a crystal ball on Vegas because Vegas was cowtown back then. Yeah, population five thousand at around ninety. Yeah, Vegas didn't people didn't want to go there until gambling started happening. They did have gambling. They had gambling, they had prostitution, they had yes, they had drinking. I guess casinos thanks to h what's his name, Buggsy. Yeah, Bugsy was one of the first, wouldn'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 or Warren Beatty. But Bugsy okay, Warren Beatty maybe gets the short stuff. So, uh the cup man, what a cut burn. It's better than just ignoring his existence and something's uh. So the Colorado River, like we said, um, it's the seventh longest in the US, about close to fift miles of total flow, and I believe that it distributes water that the river itself and then its tributaries to about million people. Of the crops in the US and of the livestock drink its water in the United States. It does now. 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 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 here get your crops. But eventually the river was gonna flood and because you had diverted the river towards your crop land, when it flooded, it flooded that irrigation ditch, and it flooded your crop land to which was a real problem for you because it would when eventually it would recede um, 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 ten gallon hat. It's not a good deal when your crop land 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 you know, a handful of even large scale farmers to take on, which was 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 U. S. Government can handle this kind of thing. And the government said, oh, well, watch, watch and learn suckers. Yeah. So it's when uh US Bureau of Reclamation said, all right, I think we can build a dam of all dams. Um, 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 going to create well, all that's great news, but more great news is we're going to create energy for a ton of people, such that this thing will even pay for itself in fifty years time. And like you said, a lot of people, I mean, this was 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 some 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 snow melt 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 irriget their crops, to feed their livestock. It's the kind of like the main artery for life in in the Southwest, or one of them. And when they found out that people in the seven States found out the US government was was wanting to damn 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 twenties, you know, the early mid twenties already thanks to Los Angeles, thanks to well, thanks to Los Angeles, UM. But it had a lot of potential, and it was growing San Francisco to it was it. It was growing in between those two, 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 um. Herbert Hoover actually intervened and said no, 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 the capacity that this reservoir will hold so that no one feels like they're they're going to 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. Um. And they said, all right, the way you a portion, it looks good to us. California is like, we all know that we're really going to get the most water, right, and it was like, totally don't worry about. Everyone's gonna hate me soon and many people will hate California one day too. Um. And so Congress said, this looks great, let's push forward. Uh, 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 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. Um. But regardless, they had no choice. Congress approved the Boulder Dam project, like you said, that later moved to Black Canyon, and for many, many years it was kind of bounced back and forth between Boulder Dam and then Hoover Dam. Uh. They officially called it Hoover Dam in nineteen thirty one, 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 nineteen seven to finally bring it back and give Hoover his due right. 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 in 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 when he was soundly defeated by FDR, I think in nineteen thirty two. That sounded so uneasy in nineteen thirty ish to election. So obviously, if you're gonna undertake a project in award contracts to two companies to build this thing, there's probably not one company that can tackle something like this that has all the different UH skills necessary to build something like the Hoover Dam. So UH six actually companies, six big big construction firms got together and UH formed what was called, wait for it, the six Companies right in nineteen thirty one, and they served as the kind of UH mega construction firm that undertook this huge, huge project. Yeah, they bid the project out at like forty eight point eight million dollars um, 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 eight hundred 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 government was spending the equivalent of today's eight hundred 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. Um, they had calculated the costs themselves, and the six companies bid was only about twenty four thousand dollars more than the six company or than the Bureau of Reclamation had estimated the project would cost about twenty four grand over right, So they were like, all right, if you want to build this whole project for dollars have added UM. And I mean obviously they were six legitimate major construction companies and then all of them combined together form one super construction company. UM. So they seem to be pretty comfortable with this consortium. And from everything I can tell, unless you're a workers rights kind of person, um, this this company. Their faith in this consortium was well placed because they did a pretty good job, saving maybe one major mistake, um, which we'll get too later. It was it's a pretty good government construction project if you ask me, public private, all right, UM, I feel like we should take a break now and come back and talk about, uh, infrastructure right for this. All right, So we're back and uh it will 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, um, 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 U S 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 five thousand people. That doesn't really help us much. It's like, you know, miles away. So here's what we're gonna have to do. Um, 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, UM west of the damn site. It had seven fifty eight 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. Uh. They had a hospital, they had a department store, they had laundry, they had a school, they had a post office, they had uh liquor stills and and that's real illegal by the way. Sure of course this depression or prohibition, UM, but they needed their booze, like, let's be honest. Uh. And this this city actually remained under government control until nineteen fifty nine, when uh it got its own incorporation, which is kind of crazy. Yeah, the the the Hoover Damn was dedicated, like the project was done basically UM by nineteen thirty eight, Um, nineteen thirty nine. I think they're still working on outbuildings and stuff for a little while. But for twenty years after a lot of the people who had UM built the damn were like, I really like this Bowlder 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, um department, uh like administrator that was like the de facto mayor of the town. And like if there was something wrong with your house, You're 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 is like federal land. And finally in nineteen what'd you say, the government was like, all right, freeloaders, you can paint your own houses from now on. This is your place. And they incorporated it into a city in nineteen sixty, I guess, yeah, And it's uh still one of two cities in Nevada that say no gambling here, which is pretty unique. You know. At the at the height of this project to Chuck Bowlder 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 a city from scratch. Um it was. It had the biggest population in Nevada at the time. Yeah, more than Vegas. Yeah, by by a few hundred people, I believe. All right, so they built I mean this is keep in mind again, this before they can even get started on this dam. They say, we gotta build a city. We gotta build um seven miles of highway, we gotta build twenty three miles of railway, we got to build um bring in like two 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 fifty cents to a dollar an hour, which is between eight bucks and twenty 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, there was there is a group called the muckers, and they were the ones who had to like get the stone in the sludge and all that stuff out of the canyon bottom. And um, they got paid the least even though they were the most um exposed to like falling rocks and falling items, and apparently like falling stuff was a real danger on this project. Yeah, well we'll get to that later, but a lot of noggins suffered. Um, 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, We've got all this stuff, We've got all these people. We got a good plan. They're like, we need to do something with this river because you can't. 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 and the tour. Now, did you just drive across it? No, we walked around. We didn't take one of these sexual like tours, tours like it was seventeen bucks, right, Like, I'm sure I know as much as this guy. Um, but no, No, I mean like we took out the whole thing and we were there for a couple of hours or anything. But it was self guided to her, How about that got you? 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. Um, that that that you would have to divert the river, that the river was still going through um Black Canyon at the time. Um, and you just couldn't build a damn there while the river was trying to get through there. There's a lot of stuff you could do so to to divert the river. Um, they did some really ingenious stuff. And if you step back and look at it from like the eyes of a like like a child, it's really just too three four steps and building this damn if you really look at a super high level or super I guess childlike again, um 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's it really kind of goes to the heart of like, just what an amazing civil engineering project this was. So like with any damn, if you want to divert that water, you're gonna have to go up straight a certain amount, and they have very smart engineers that figure out exactly where to do this. And in this case they built uh Coffer dams, which is a very common thing to do when you want to build a damn downstream. It's basically sort of like a big hole in the river that uh 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 uh the other you know, those those tunnels rejoin each other as the Colorado River once again downstream, right. And I think the Coffer Dam is actually kind of like a like an earthworks, like a wall inside the water. Yeah you will, you pump the water out, you kind of make it a hole. But yeah, so so this these tunnels that they diverted this too, Chuck, where it combined four miles four miles of tunnel, so each each tunnel was about a mile because there are four of them through the canyon rock which was granite. And they dug out these tunnels as and built the Coffer Dam just to start the whole thing, not as part of the larger project, but this is like to to just to get started. That was the first thing they had to do. Yeah, there were fifty ft 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 was racing through those at a rate of two hundred thousand cubic feet per second. So it's amazing. That's a hundred and thirty six um Olympic sized pools per minute passing through there. Yeah, I mean this would be remarkable today, dude. Yeah, you know for sure. And as we'll see those those things are still in operation, although they use them differently now. Um, but yeah, that that's that's just a ton of water. And and they said, yep, success, it worked. We diverted um this water down further downstream because you know, the tunnels ended below the damn 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're like, all right, we feel like we could just quit now because what we did was pretty awesome. But we don't have a damn yet. So in this huge canyon, we need, uh, if we're gonna build a dam, we need to make these walls smooth because they were you know, 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 want to say the most dangerous job, but it's kind of hard to pick. But the high scale ers 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 like on a rope with like a toolbag hanging from me. He's like scaling down the side of the uh, the canyon wall. And that's exactly what they did. Because if you're trying to clear the canyon walls and you're talking, you know, your seven hundred feet up between the bottom of the canyon and the canyon rim, You've got a lot of rock that you're trying to get out of there. Um, it's not easy. You can't just you know, hit it with a pole and priyate loose. You get to blast it loose, actually sure, but to no avail. They spent a good year and a half trying that and nothing happened. Um, but the uh I'm totally joking about that, by the way, Um, Okay, to to blast it the 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 wholesomewhere, you know, 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 four pound jackhammer lowered to him, and then it drill a hole with a jackhammer suspended from the edge of the canyon um into the into the mid air um 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 private rocks loose. 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 eleven years. Jack 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 son's an interesting thing, right A right, good point. Um, All right, so they're they're blasting these things out. These dudes, uh, believe it or not, did not even have hard hats at the time. They were not supplied with hard hats. No. That's one big criticis some of the six six Companies consortium that they did not care about workers, right. So there was a strike that happened in and the guy running the show for the six companies name was Frank Crow. They called him hurry up Crow. Um, 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 it's 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 is just like, all right, you're making us look bad. We'll we'll get some actual ones. But it took like a little while before they had any any actual hard hats on site. Yeah, those homemade ones are called hard boiled hats, and they really actually worked that. Um. I know that thing you sent said that some of the rocks falling on these hard boiled hats. Their their head would be fine, but it would be such force that would actually break their jaw. So these they worked, these hard bowl hats actually worked, um, but I imagine they wanted the real thing. You'd be like if I don't think though, And they would do tricks and stuff like in their downtime they would you know, a lot of these people were I mean not a lot, but some of them were like circus workers, right, and people like former military that could do this kind of thing. And apparently between working they would fly around and do little, uh 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 is it is it? It's got to 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 dizzy heights so that it wasn't a big deal. And those are the same tribes that you know 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. But there we have to. We have to tell this once, the story of Burrel Our Rutledge, though, man like like, I almost faint just 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 the Boulder Damn Hoover Dam project at the time, you were more than seven feet above the bottom of the canyon, which for all intents and purposes, is straight down. That's like a sixty story building. Basically, it's a really really big height and you can sense it, man, when you're there, and Hoover Dam, if you haven't been, go it's totally worth the trip for sure, um, especially if you're in Las Vegas. Um. 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 sixty story building below him, that's right. And then thankfully, um he either had a a former circus worker or somebody who was just very brave named Oliver Cowen about below apparently heard this, I guess it calls a bit of a commotion and swung himself out. He's hanging in a it's called abortion 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, you know, 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, like, just let me go, 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 like it's all over. I'm never going to be the same again. Well, that's probably true. You would just moved to the to the lowest place in the continuous contiguous United States. I can't imagine what the rest of Burl Rutledge's day was after that, but it was good. I bet he drank a lot. I hope it was a good day. But yeah, So that happened like that, 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 panned out pretty well for Burl Rutledge at least. All right, man, I think it's time for a message break, agreed, all right? So do are dying? Though? Um? I saw anywhere between like ninety three to ninety six to a hundred people died total in the whole project, which, all things being equal, for what they were doing, isn't that high of a number. Um A hundred lives is a lot though to be lost on a specific engineering project. Yeah, I saw as high as a hundred and twelve. And the six companies, again, they weren't exactly known for having like the loosest pockets. If you file the some sort of health claim against them for you know, an injury or an illness sustained working on the job, there was Um. I think like thirty six forty two 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 or carbon monoxide poison because the six companies wanted to cover it up so they didn't 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. Yeah, so that was the kind of stuff that they endured. Um. Heat stroke killed a lot of people too. Oh yeah, in the summer of nine three alone, apparently about three people per week. We're dying a pete stroke because dude in in the sun in these tunnels in particular, apparently would get up to a hundred and forty degrees fahrenheit, which is some ungodly amount and celsius too, and then in the shade. On the worst days, it would get to like a hundred and twenty degrees in the shade. It's a dry heat though. Sure it's not the heat, it's the humidity unless it's a hundred and twenty and then it doesn't matter. Yeah, And one of the common um urban legends is that there are dead bodies um in the concrete of Hoover Damn. 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 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 going to weaken the structure. So they had to fish all these bodies out and even still well we'll talk about the concrete next, but just just to kind of lay the foundation for this point, feel forgive the punt you when they when they poured a bucket's worth of concrete to build the damn face there the damn itself, I guess um the dam was so enormous that the 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 were you fell into two inches of concrete basically, So you were you were you were going to get lost in the concrete or anything like that. And then on top of that, yet they even if they did not care about whether you spent eternity entombed, they would be like, well, you're not gonna You're not gonna screw with the integrity of our damn So, yes, there's no dead bodies in there, no dead bodies. So so let's talk about the concrete, shall we, real quick? Yeah? Um, So at this point, the walls are clean and smooth. They've got these abutments in place, which, by the way, if I may, okay, So I looked all over for the abutments, and all I ever saw was it's the it's the walls of the canyon, the rock walls of the canyon, or the abutments from what I can gather. Um, you know how when you when you grab somebody nicely and in 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 the 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 um, rather than than that person, these abutments are the canyon walls holding the damn itself in places. Okay, I mean I had, but like I couldn't tell if they were like parts of that stuck out of the damn 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. They go, that was it's different in your teeth but not really the same word, same function, right, So these abutments are in place, and they were like, all right, we gotta start pouring some concrete. The design itself, Um, a lot of damns use this design. It's called a gravity arch, and it's basically just using the natural pressure of of the land to uh kind of force everything tight into that uh tightened down that concrete between those two canyons. Yeah, it's really ingenious, dude. It's 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 bridge the walls of the canyon pushed back, which only strengthens the bridge. Same exact thing. It's like if you took a bridge at 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 damn into the sides of the canyon walls, which press back strengthens the damn. It's ingenious, ingenious, I tell you, yeah, And so uh 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 damns are, but um, apparently engineers thought that would freak people out to have a flat slab damn that big, and so they said, let's just curve it anyway, because everyone understands basic physics, right, all right, and it looks cool and it does look very cool. Um, alright, so we're we're actually finally to the concrete. Um. There are three point two five million cubic yards of concrete that make up the Hoover dam, uh and then another one point one one million cubic yards and um, it's not just the damn face. There's a lot of you know, the 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 on site, uh, sen in rail cars hoisted down on these cableways that they had built. And every seventy eight seconds, these workers would get a new bucket of concrete to poor right right for um until about five ft of the dam had been poured, and then after that they had to stop for seventy two 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. Um 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 um 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 on site to like 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 seventy two hours, where if they had poured a slab that if they poured the Hoover Dam in one big slab had just left it, first of all, it would have been all messed up all kinds of ways. But it also would have taken about a hundred and twenty five years to cure fully on its own. It'd still be curing now. But they get they managed to get these you know, five foot increments to cure in about seventy two 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 as they went a long and they were right like time after time. That's the most astounding part to me. Yeah, I mean that the heat is a big problem for concrete because it's going to 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. Um, they divide this whole thing up into blocks, and there are two hundred blocks total making up the Hoover Dam. Um. Depending they're they're smaller at the downstream face and they are upstream, but they range from about square feet to sixty square feet. Uh. And all of those blocks together, all two hundred of them, make up the Hoover Dam. Finally, on 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 squeeze grout, which is um 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 cap that off. So inside the Hoover Dam there's enough concrete to make a sixteen ft wide, eight inch deep road all the way from San Francisco to New York. It is amazing. So, dude, I think we should do this into two parts. If Evil Kinevel got a two parter, I think the Hoover Dam deserves a two parter. Two. We've been at it for forty five 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. Uh, well, I guess that brings up listener mail, right, Chuck, I think let's skip listener mail. Okay, Damn doesn't get too listener mails. Okay, fine, was just it was getting a little ambitious. Well, in the meantime, if you want to drop us a line, you can go to stuff you Should Know dot com and check out our social links. You can check me out on the Josh Clark Way dot com and you can send me Chuck, Jerry and everyone involved in Stuff you Should Know an email to stuff podcast at i heeart radio dot com. Stuff you Should Know is a production of iHeart Radios. How stuff works for more podcasts for my heart Radio because at the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.