OCR

1936 Projects completed in 1936 were: Hoover (Boulder) Dam - As work on Deadwood Dam was successfully drawing to a close, the decade of the thirties was opening new and greater challenges to dam, builders. Massive, multi-purpose dams, requiring greater amounts of equipment and larger outlays of capital were being proposed. No single contractor had the machinery or financial resources to meet the bidding and building requirements of a Hoover, a Bonneville, or a Grand Coulee all concrete giants. The joint-venture system became indispensable. Morrison-Knudsen and Utah had built Guernsey and Deadwood Dams, each in dual partnership. Now with the Federal Government considering construction of Hoover Dam, H. W. Morrison proposed to Utah the for- mation of a larger group of co-adventures and four invitations to other western contractors were accepted. The group incorporated as Six Companies, Inc., but actually comprised eight companies - three of the firms, W. H. Bechtel Co. , Henry J. Kaiser Co., and Warren Brothers Co., sharing a separate incorporated Interest as the sixth company using the name Bechtel - Kaiser - Warren Company. The five others were Utah; Morrison-Knudsel; J. F. Shea Co., Inc.; Pacific Bridge Company; and MacDonald & Kahn, Inc. Six Companies, Inc. was low bidder for Hoover among three competing groups and was awarded the contract by the Bureau of Reclamation to build the dam. The bid was $48,890,995.50 -- $5,002,883.20 below the second contender. It was then the largest single project ever opened to competitive bidding. Many years of preliminary study had been made by the Bureau of Reclamation before choosing the Black Canyon of the Colorado as the site of Hoover Dam. (once called Boulder, of the Boulder Canyon project of the Bureau of Reclamation). In this gloomy slot of earth, 30 miles southwest of Las Vegas, Nevada, the treacherous Colorado River slashed through sheer cliffs 800 feet high in a torrent that at flood bulged five feet higher in the middle than at its sides. Sunlight, reflected from the water and the cliffs, sometimes caused a temperature of 130 degrees. The area was reached only by the most primitive of roads and, at first, barges were the only means of getting supplies and equipment into the canyon. But this site offered the firmest bedrock foundation and was the closest to irrigable lands. The silt-laden yellow waters of the river, draining one-twelfth of the land area of the United States, had for centuries flooded all in their path, , Early irrigation attempts at regulation of the river were com- pletely destroyed as the rampaging stream frequently shifted course.