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According to Hoover Dam Inside and Out, a personal photographic account of this majestic landmark, Hoover Dam is 727 feet high. That's about one and a half Washington Monuments. The dam is also 1,244 feet long (a fantastic car ride if you're in the area), 660 feet thick at the base, and 45 feet thick at the crest. The dam tips the scales at around 5,500,000 tons, and is made out of 3,250,000 cubic yards of concrete. On the Lake Mead side of the dam, the water is over 500 feet deep. The dam lets through between 50,000 and 300,000 gallons of water a day, and has a power capacity of 1,350 megawatts. Hoover Dam is the highest concrete arch dam in the United States,
and was completed in 1936. Originally called Boulder Dam, it was re-christened Hoover Dam by Harry Truman in 1947. A PBS American Experience documentary about the building of Hoover Dam details the project's historical dimensions. In the light of Black History Month, we noted that Depression-era hiring policies reveal a sad chapter in U.S. race relations. Only 24 African-Americans were hired on the construction project (comprising less than one percent of the work force), and those workers were forced to live 30 miles away from the project. They were also forced to drink from separate water buckets while on the job.
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