Author : Jerry Borrowman
Publisher :
Page : 256 pages
File Size : 11,68 MB
Release : 2010-08-16
Category : Boulder City (Nev.)
ISBN : 9780984383603
It's 1931 and men are desperate for jobs. A lucky few will get to work in the searing heat of the Nevada desert on the massive Hoover Dam, the single largest public works project in history. Their goal is to tame the mighty Colorado River with a dam that will create the largest man-made lake in the world. But can they can overcome their own prejudices to do it?
Author : David Owen
Publisher : Penguin
Page : 289 pages
File Size : 43,67 MB
Release : 2017-04-11
Category : Science
ISBN : 0698189906
“Wonderfully written…Mr. Owen writes about water, but in these polarized times the lessons he shares spill into other arenas. The world of water rights and wrongs along the Colorado River offers hope for other problems.” —Wall Street Journal An eye-opening account of where our water comes from and where it all goes. The Colorado River is an essential resource for a surprisingly large part of the United States, and every gallon that flows down it is owned or claimed by someone. David Owen traces all that water from the Colorado’s headwaters to its parched terminus, once a verdant wetland but now a million-acre desert. He takes readers on an adventure downriver, along a labyrinth of waterways, reservoirs, power plants, farms, fracking sites, ghost towns, and RV parks, to the spot near the U.S.–Mexico border where the river runs dry. Water problems in the western United States can seem tantalizingly easy to solve: just turn off the fountains at the Bellagio, stop selling hay to China, ban golf, cut down the almond trees, and kill all the lawyers. But a closer look reveals a vast man-made ecosystem that is far more complex and more interesting than the headlines let on. The story Owen tells in Where the Water Goes is crucial to our future: how a patchwork of engineering marvels, byzantine legal agreements, aging infrastructure, and neighborly cooperation enables life to flourish in the desert—and the disastrous consequences we face when any part of this tenuous system fails.
Author : Heather Miller
Publisher : Norwood House Press
Page : 50 pages
File Size : 23,78 MB
Release : 2013-07-01
Category : Juvenile Nonfiction
ISBN : 1599535955
The Hoover Dam is more than just enormous concrete wall. It is an engineering marvel achieved by careful planning and hard, dangerous work. By using gravity and the force of flowing water, 17 turbines inside the Hoover Dam produce electricity for millions of people. Correlates with STEM instruction. Includes glossary, websites, and bibliography for further reading.
Author : Joseph E. Stevens
Publisher : University of Oklahoma Press
Page : 338 pages
File Size : 40,19 MB
Release : 2014-09-12
Category : Architecture
ISBN : 0806148144
In the spring of 1931, in a rugged desert canyon on the Arizona-Nevada border, an army of workmen began one of the most difficult and daring building projects ever undertaken—the construction of Hoover Dam. Through the worst years of the Great Depression as many as five thousand laborers toiled twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week, to erect the huge structure that would harness the Colorado River and transform the American West. Construction of the giant dam was a triumph of human ingenuity, yet the full story of this monumental endeavor has never been told. Now, in an engrossing, fast-paced narrative, Joseph E. Stevens recounts the gripping saga of Hoover Dam. Drawing on a wealth of material, including manuscript collections, government documents, contemporary newspaper and magazine accounts, and personal interviews and correspondence with men and women who were involved with the construction, he brings the Hoover Dam adventure to life. Described here in dramatic detail are the deadly hazards the work crews faced as they hacked and blasted the dam’s foundation out of solid rock; the bitter political battles and violent labor unrest that threatened to shut the job down; the deprivation and grinding hardship endured by the workers’ families; the dam builders’ gambling, drinking, and whoring sprees in nearby Las Vegas; and the stirring triumphs and searing moments of terror as the massive concrete wedge rose inexorably from the canyon floor. Here, too, is an unforgettable cast of characters: Henry Kaiser, Warren Bechtel, and Harry Morrison, the ambitious, headstrong construction executives who gambled fortune and fame on the Hoover Dam contract; Frank Crowe, the brilliant, obsessed field engineer who relentlessly drove the work force to finish the dam two and a half years ahead of schedule; Sims Ely, the irascible, teetotaling eccentric who ruled Boulder City, the straightlaced company town created for the dam workers by the federal government; and many more men and women whose courage and sacrifice, greed and frailty, made the dam’s construction a great human, as well as technological, adventure. Hoover Dam is a compelling, irresistible account of an extraordinary American epic.
Author : Blaine Harden
Publisher : W. W. Norton & Company
Page : 289 pages
File Size : 38,61 MB
Release : 2012-04-02
Category : Nature
ISBN : 0393344525
"Superbly reported and written with clarity, insight, and great skill." —Washington Post Book World After two decades, Washington Post journalist Blaine Harden returned to his small-town birthplace in the Pacific Northwest to follow the rise and fall of the West’s most thoroughly conquered river. To explore the Columbia River and befriend those who collaborated in its destruction, he traveled on a monstrous freight barge sailing west from Idaho to the Grand Coulee Dam, the site of the river’s harnessing for the sake of jobs, electricity, and irrigation. A River Lost is a searing personal narrative of rediscovery joined with a narrative of exploitation: of Native Americans, of endangered salmon, of nuclear waste, and of a once-wild river. Updated throughout, this edition features a new foreword and afterword.
Author : Zane Grey
Publisher : Center Point Pub
Page : 334 pages
File Size : 35,29 MB
Release : 2011-11-01
Category : Fiction
ISBN : 9781611732122
Straddling the great Colorado River, a huge structure is slowly rising -- a dam that will alter the course of this ravaging river and harness its awesome power. Men from all over America have flocked to the site, laboring at the dam by day and filling the nearby Las Vegas gambling houses by night. To Lynn Weston, a rich man's son, working on the dam means independence and the chance to prove his courage. But an even greater challenge faces Lynn: he discovers a girl who has escaped her abductors in the back seat of his car, and becomes her self-appointed protector. Suddenly, he finds himself threatened by a pack of ruthless gangsters with a vicious plan to blow up the dam! There will be feats of heroism and periods of exhaustion in the creation of the Boulder Dam. And Lynn has proven his mettle many times over. But will he be able to save the girl he has fallen in love with when she's kidnapped again?
Author : Kelly Milner Halls
Publisher : Cherry Lake
Page : 36 pages
File Size : 18,90 MB
Release : 2014-01-01
Category : Juvenile Nonfiction
ISBN : 1624317227
This book relays the factual details of the story of the Hoover Dam, which was built in the 1930s. The narrative provides multiple accounts of the event, and readers learn details through the point of view of a Colorado River explorer, a dam worker, and a dam worker's daughter. The text offers opportunities to compare and contrast various perspectives in the text while gathering and analyzing information about a historical event.
Author : Gary Hansen
Publisher : WetDesert
Page : 375 pages
File Size : 34,53 MB
Release : 2007-05
Category : Fiction
ISBN : 097935210X
Grant Stevens, a mid-level manager for the Bureau of Reclamation, only wanted to build dams. He never imagined he would be swept into a desperate race against an environmental terrorist bent on restoring the Colorado River by blowing up the dams. Left temporarily in charge of the Bureau, Grant must react when the first dam is attacked. He faces the unthinkable task of mitigating the massive flood roaring down the Colorado. The flood will eventually threaten the mighty Hoover Dam, and if Hoover fails, the other dams downstream will fall like dominos. Working with the FBI, Grant uses his engineering skills, river knowledge, and plenty of gut instinct in an attempt to outmaneuver the terrorist. The chase will lead all the way downstream to the Gulf of California in a cat and mouse game where the stakes are high and the potential for destruction is enormous.
Author : Kelly Milner Halls
Publisher : Millbrook Press (Tm)
Page : 44 pages
File Size : 44,16 MB
Release : 2019
Category : Juvenile Nonfiction
ISBN : 1512482005
This in-depth look at the science of decomposition showcases how and why living things are recycled by the planet and its creatures after death. Full color.
Author : Bruce Murkoff
Publisher : Vintage
Page : 418 pages
File Size : 40,84 MB
Release : 2007-12-18
Category : Fiction
ISBN : 0307430138
When Filius Poe sets out for Boulder City, the country is in the grips of the Great Depression, the Hoover administration in its final days. Filius, a young engineer from Wisconsin with a number of dams under his belt, has secured a job helping to tame the mighty Colorado and hopes the sheer scale of the era's greatest engineering feat will distract him from recent, devastating losses. Meanwhile, Lena and Burr McCardell, a young mother and son fleeing a shocking betrayal, and Lew Beck, a diminutive fighter with a short fuse to match his stature--as well as thousands of other workers–have embarked upon similar pilgrimages to "the only city in America where everyone has a job." Soon, the lives of these troubled souls have intersected, offering up both the promise of second chance at love and the threat of shocking violence and wrath. Bruce Markuff, the literary equivalent of a master river guide, navigates the stories of these characters and more to offer a breathtaking vista of history and humanity.
