Friends in High Places: The Bechtel Story : The Most Secret Corporation and How It Engineered the Wo by Laton Mccartney (readict .txt) 📗

wild river,” Frank Crowe said. “One day, it rose 40 feet in 40 minutes. It became a wall of yellow mud that kept rising and rising until I thought it was going to wash all of us right out of the canyon. “6

Making working conditions even more harrowing were the extremes of weather. Sudden storms washed out roads and blew down workers’

tents. Always fierce, the heat during the summer of 1931 averaged 12

degrees above normal, with temperatures at river level often hitting 120

to 130 degrees. With the heat refracting off the canyon walls, workers felt as if they were roasting in a huge oven. Such were the temperatures that gasoline tanks exploded by spontaneous combustion. The man who unthinkingly picked up a crowbar with his bare hands usually came away with a second-degree burn. During the first few months of 35

FRIENDS IN HIGH PLACES

building, heat prostration alone caused several deaths per week.

Yet thanks to the Depression, there was no shortage of workers eager to sign on. By the time Six Companies set up operations at Black Canyon in June 1931, upwards of 10,000 men from all over the.country had converged on the Las Vegas area, lured by the newspaper stories about Boulder and by Six Companies’ announcements of job openings. As a result, Crowe was quickly able to assemble a work force, picking and choosing from an enormous labor pool that had gathered almost overnight. Eventually, a thousand of the men would be housed in Boulder City, a company town with paved streets and shade trees that Six Companies was building seven miles from the damsite.

Boulder City, however, would not be completed until 1932, and until then, the men lived in tents.

Getting a fast start on the project was critical for Six Companies, since in negotiating the Boulder contract, Crowe and his bosses-led now by Bechtel, who had been elected president after W H. Wattis succumbed to cancer in September 1931-had built in performance incentives. The more quickly the work went, the fatter would be Six Companies’ financial rewards in the form of paybacks and bonuses.

By July, when Crowe announced that Six Companies had begun

“highballing” the project-going all out-the first of the building materials had started to arrive. Altogether, in building the dam Six Companies used 45 million pounds of reinforced steel, 8 million tons of sand, 840 miles of pipe and more concrete than had been needed for all fifty of the previous Department of Reclamation dams combined.

On some days, Six Companies would take delivery of 60 railroad cars of cement and other building materials. Forty-two railroad cars were required simply to bring in parts for each of the 2-million-pound bulkhead gates used to open and close the tunnels Crowe’s workers were digging through both sides of the gorge.

As materials kept arriving, conveyed by Six Companies’ own truck fleet and twenty-nine-engine railroad, some of Crowe’s crews began bringing in power lines from California to provide the electricity needed to drive much of the heavy equipment. Other workers, meanwhile, started laying hundreds of miles of railroad track and roads, while still others began spanning sections of the gorge with steel bridges and a network of cableways.

Once all these preparations were in place, workers began blasting and drilling thousands of feet of earth and silt from the canyon walls to find the bedrock that would ultimately anchor the dam. The so-called

“high-scalers” hung like mountain climbers from ropes extending down 36

BOULDER

the rim of the