I know you got soul: machines with that certain something (12 page)

Its seventeen motors, each of which weighs more than 100 tons and turns at 90 revs per minute, generate around 3 million horsepower, which is enough oomph to provide 1.8 million people in the western United States with electricity. And yet the strangest, and best, thing about this colossus is that it runs on water. It is powered by the Colorado River.

The Colorado has brought down so much silt and soil from the mountains over the years that it has quite literally changed the shape of America. This silt has been deposited in the sea in such vast quantities that it’s become land. Today, the
Colorado River’s journey is 150 miles longer because the Gulf of California is now that much further away. But altering the shape of a continent was just a starter for this truly amazing waterway.

You see, it’s not just a silt-delivery system. It is also a moody and temperamental bastard with a punch that mere mortals find hard to comprehend… Once I had some luck at the blackjack tables in Las Vegas and decided to spend the winnings on a short helicopter flight to the river’s greatest achievement – the Grand Canyon.

As we left the city limits the pilot flew lower and lower until the skids were just a few feet from the desert floor and then bang. In an instant we were a mile high. My stomach turned, my eyes became saucers, I think my teeth may have moved about a bit. I had seen the Canyon in films and pictures but nothing – nothing – can prepare you for the shock of seeing it, live, for the first time. Its vastness quite simply beggars belief.

Far, far below there appeared to be grassy banks to the river, a blaze of green in this barren and hostile land. But as the Jet Ranger went down it became apparent that they were in fact trees. That’s what the Grand Canyon does to your sense of perspective. It turns a mighty Scots pine,
or whatever they were, into a blade of grass.

After we landed I strolled over to the river that had made this giant axe-smash in the crust of the earth and I wondered. How? It had no access to nuclear weapons, not that there’s a nuke in anyone’s arsenal that could have created such a chasm. So how did it do such a thing?

It didn’t look like much, a sort of benign brown worm really, a silted-up slither. They used to say in the olden days that, thanks to the silt, it was too thick to drink and too thin to plough. But then, this was June. This was the quiet time.

In the spring things are rather different. In the spring all of the snow that has fallen on the western side of the Rockies – and there’s a lot – starts to melt. From an area of 1,000 square miles a million streams are created, which trickle with increasing force into the Colorado. Now it’s carrying billions and billions of gallons of water a day. Now it’s a raging, seething torrent. Now it can cut through volcanic rock as though it’s not there at all.

For centuries man had simply not bothered with the Colorado at all. When it was quiet it was useless. When it was noisy it had the power to smash entire mountains.

But since the beginning of the nineteenth century man had begun to develop an ego. In Britain the likes of Stephenson and Brunel and Telford really were going boldly where no one had gone before. Giant steamships made from iron were conquering the seas. Trains were bringing cities closer together, bridges were linking communities that had been split since the dawn of time.

There was a sense we were unstoppable and that nothing couldn’t be tamed. And so the Americans decided to have a go at mastering the Colorado. A young surveyor and engineer called Charles Rockwood – Brunel he wasn’t – realised that the Colorado desert was at a lower elevation than the Colorado River. So he reckoned that if he built a tributary, gravity would carry water to the desert, making it rich and fertile.

Brilliant! Uninhabitable desert would be transformed into pasture. Land prices would rocket. Rockwood would make a fortune.

He found himself a wealthy backer in Los Angeles, changed the name of the Colorado Desert, which sounded a bit bleak, to Imperial Valley, which sounded much better, and people began to buy plots. The first water began to flow along his canal on 14 May 1901, and for a while
things looked good. By this stage 7,000 people had moved in and the agricultural production went far beyond even the most optimistic predictions.

But old Charlie Boy hadn’t thought things through. You see, it wasn’t only water that was flowing into his canal. There was so much silt that just three years after the project began a four-mile section of the canal was completely bunged up. As a result everyone’s crops died that year.

But a few dead fields of wheat were nothing compared to what happened next.

Rockwood figured the solution – God knows why – was to build a second canal. He didn’t know it but he was about to unleash the beast. He was walking into a nightmare of epic proportions.

Almost immediately after the second canal opened in the March of 1905 the spring meltwaters appeared and a small lake began to form in a place called Salton. They called it the Salton Sink and figured there was time to think what should be done. But there wasn’t. Just six months later the Salton Sink covered 150 square miles and was 60 feet deep. And water was still flooding in at the rate of 150,000 cubic feet – a second.

At this rate they would have an inland ocean on their hands.

To make matters worse, engineers had noticed that a small waterfall at the lake’s exit point was growing – and growing fast. The ground onto which the water was falling was being washed away, so that within weeks the waterfall was 100 feet high. And the cascade flowing over it was cutting a channel at random through the desert at the rate of one mile a day.

They probably thought this was no big deal. They probably thought that, eventually, they’d find a way to cut off supply to the second canal. But actually the clock was ticking – geologists who visited the site worked out that pretty soon the waterfall would be one mile high and that the course of the Colorado would be changed for ever, with catastrophic consequences.

The government stepped in and spent $3 million and two years rectifying Rockwood’s hopelessness.

Now you’d have expected after this debacle that Washington would have been wary of any projects with the Colorado, but just 22 years later, in 1929, President Hoover approved a plan to build a dam. A dam that today bears his name.

The timing simply couldn’t have been better, because just six months after the approval was
given the stock market crashed and the Great Depression swept across the land. Unemployment rocketed to 25 per cent and as a result there was no trouble at all finding men willing to work on what was almost certainly the most barbaric engineering feat of the twentieth century.

The site chosen for the dam was in Boulder Canyon, which was a barren piece of nowhere. Las Vegas, built by workers on the transcontinental railway line, was a two-bit whorehouse with a few bars, and anyway it was twenty miles away.

As work began and men began to flood in with their families, a tented village sprang up on the banks of the river. They called it Ragtown and it was horrific. No public order, no sanitation, no respite from the fierce summer heat and no running water. Still, life in the camp was five-star luxury compared to life on the dam site.

First of all, the river had to be temporarily diverted so the dam could be built. That meant four giant tunnels, each 56 feet in diameter and three-quarters of a mile long, had to be blasted through the 700-foot-high walls of the canyon. The air inside these tunnels was a mix of dust from the explosions and fumes from the trucks that took the waste away.

As the men began to collapse and die, many tried to pressurise the company building the dam to use electric vehicles instead, but the company knew they had everyone over a barrel. Complain and you lost your job. And you weren’t going to get another.

Only when the workforce was told their $5-a-day wages were to be cut was there a strike. But it was over in days.

As the tunnels were being built, other men were sent over the edge of the canyon to prepare the cliff faces for the dam. These guys were known as ‘high scalers’ and they spent their days dangling on ropes, blasting stubborn bits of rock with dynamite and chiselling the easier parts.

Some died when rocks from above fell on their heads. Some died when they fell onto the rocks below. But despite this, everyone kept working and going home to Ragtown at night. Because there was no option.

Time was of the essence. The company had to get the river flowing through the tunnels by the winter of 1932, when the water was low. Or they’d be stuck for a whole year. And if they hadn’t completed the bypass system by October 1933, they’d be facing penalties of $3,000 a day.

The pace of work was therefore furious. Site boss Frank Crowe drove his men so hard that if a man died, he was simply left. ‘He can’t do any harm now,’ the foremen would say, as the endless stream of machinery and men trundled by. Trucks carrying rocks blasted from the tunnels were made to reverse down narrow canyon roads so they didn’t have to waste time turning round at the top. Drivers developed the art of backing up with the door open, so they could jump if the truck toppled over the side. It was worse than hell out there.

And the summer of 1931 was the hottest on record. Even at the camp women and children were dying of heat exhaustion. At the site it was 130 degrees, and it was not unusual for the workers’ body temperatures to rise to 110 degrees.

And then the river decided to show everyone who was boss. It had been meandering past the site for months, but almost as though it sensed what was being done it girded its loins and went berserk.

After the water had receded the entire site was covered in a thick layer of silt and mud. So Crowe made everyone work even harder and even faster to get back on schedule. And he made it. On
time, a 750-foot-wide temporary dam was made, forcing the river into his new tunnels and, for the first time in millions of years, the floor of the Boulder Canyon was dry. Work on the main dam could begin.

Now you might think that this would be simple. You’d just need a lot of concrete. But unfortunately, when concrete sets there’s a chemical reaction within it that generates heat. So if it were to be poured into the canyon in one continuous stream, engineers figured, the dam would take 120 years to cool down.

It was therefore made in blocks 60 feet by 5, all interlaced, until on 1 February 1935 there it was; 726 feet high, 660 feet thick at the base and more than 1,200 feet across, easily the largest dam in the world. And it had been built in one of the most inhospitable places on earth, in five years, for less than $50 million. The electricity made there today generates that much cash every three months.

The temporary dam was removed, and the Colorado once again tried to resume its normal course. But the wall held it back, and back, and back. It rose, drowning Ragtown, the tented village, to become a reservoir that sits now like a
massive blue splodge on the borders of Nevada and Arizona. It’s called Lake Mead and it contains enough water to drown the state of Pennsylvania to a depth of a foot. There are 9.2 trillion gallons sitting there, waiting to be sucked through the dam’s intake pipes, past the turbines and turned into power we can actually use.

It was one of these intake pipes that claimed the Hoover’s final victim. On 20 December 1935 Patrick Tierney fell inside and died… exactly thirteen years after the first accident at the site claimed the life of his father.

Today there are other dams on the Colorado, and other reservoirs. And so great is the evaporation from these giant inland seas that by the time the Colorado reaches the coast in Mexico it’s just a saline trickle. It hasn’t just been beaten. Thanks to America’s insatiable appetite for everything it’s been killed.

Elsewhere in the US and the rest of the world there are other dams that dwarf the Hoover. But for me, it’s still the most special, partly because of the 107 men who died making it and partly because of where it is.

There’s something strangely odd about a straight, man-made edge in this barren and craggy
terrain. It’s as out of place as a footprint on the moon or the rusting hulk of the
Titanic
on the seabed. It shouldn’t belong, and yet, somehow, it does.

I love it too for what it has created. Quite simply, without the Hoover Dam there would be no Las Vegas and no Phoenix. Without manageable water supplies and electricity these places could never have become the sprawling cities that they are today.

It’s clean electricity too. To produce the 2,000 megawatts that comes out of the huge white wall every year would normally take 10,000 barrels of oil. And, of course, with oil you don’t produce enough water as a by-product for 18 million people.

But the best thing about the Hoover Dam is the way it looks. With its art deco intake towers and that preposterous slope, which seems to accentuate the height when you stand on the top, it is every bit as beautiful as the canyon in which it sits. And that, believe me, is saying something.

It’s regarded now as one of the prime terrorist targets in the world and as a result all commercial traffic and any bus carrying luggage is banned from driving over it. There’s a fear that if it were
to be destroyed, it would take a huge chunk of western America with it.

That would be sad, I’m sure. But not as sad as losing the dam. That would be unbearable.

It’s a ship, first and foremost. But it’s also a nuclear power station. And it’s an airport. And it’s an instrument of war. And above all this, it’s a city with shops, cinemas, hairdressers, banks, hospitals, its own television station, its own daily newspaper and 5,000 inhabitants.

Think about that. Would they put a nuclear reactor in the middle of a city? And would they let fighter jets land on the roof, when the whole thing is pitching and rolling in 50-foot seas? Because that’s what happens on an aircraft carrier. They land F-14s and F-18s, which may be carrying nuclear weapons, on a nuclear power station in bad weather. Dangerous? Oh yes, which is why, when an invitation came to spend a couple of days on board the USS
Dwight D. Eisenhower
, I was off like a scalded rabbit.