September 30, 1935: Hoover Dam Opens

September 30, 1935, 90 years ago: Hoover Dam is dedicated, on the Colorado River between Boulder City, Nevada and Temple Bar Marina, Arizona, 33 miles southeast of Las Vegas. It provides electricity for Southern California. Without it, the rise of Los Angeles and San Diego would have been a lot harder.

It is a concrete gravity-arch dam, rising 726 feet above ground level, with a capacity of 3.25 million cubic yards. By damming up the river, it created Lake Mead, resulting also in Lake Mead National Recreation Area. There were 112 deaths among the construction workers, and a plaque memorializes them, saying, "They died to make the desert bloom."

President Herbert Hoover signed Congress' appropriation for it into law, and Secretary of the Interior Ray Wilbur, in charge of its construction, named it Hoover Dam. But after the 1932 election, President Franklin D. Roosevelt wanted to wipe Hoover and the depths of the Great Depression from the national memory, because, as one writer said, "The Great Engineer had quickly drained, ditched and dammed the country." FDR appointed a new Secretary, Harold Ickes, and, in 1933, he renamed it after Boulder City: Boulder Dam.

In his dedication speech, Ickes used the name "Boulder Dam" 5 times in 30 seconds. Also in the speech, he said that if it should be named after any one person, it should be Senator Hiram Johnson of California, who sponsored the bill, knowing that his State would benefit the most. And he was a Republican.

In 1947, after the Republicans took control of Congress for the 1st time since 1930, they passed bills through both houses restoring the name Hoover Dam. Unlike FDR, his successor, President Harry Truman, had no problem with the name, and signed it into law.

The top of the Dam was bannered as part of U.S. Route 93, but it was only 2 lanes. In 2010, a new bridge opened over the Colorado River, just downstream from the Dam. It was named the Mike O'Callaghan-Pat Tillman Memorial Bridge. O'Callaghan was Governor of Nevada from 1971 to 1979. Tillman was the Arizona State University and Arizona Cardinals safety who left the NFL to enlist in the U.S. Army after the 9/11 attacks, and was killed in action in Afghanistan.

Hoover Dam and the O'Callaghan-Tillman Bridge 

The new bridge is bannered as Interstate 11 and U.S. Route 93, while the top of the dam has been rebannered as Nevada Route 172.

Hoover Dam is one of those American icons that tends to get destroyed in disaster movies, including Superman: The Movie in 1978, Dante's Peak in 1997, 10.5: Apocalypse in 2006, San Andreas in 2015. In reality, it still stands, and supplies badly-needed water and electricity to the American Southwest.