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Hoover Dam

After spending a night in Los Vegas, the next stop was at Hoover Dam. Driving over the top of it wasn't very impressive. To one side, you have Lake Mead (one of the largest man made lakes) and the other side is the Colorado River. The height of the dam isn't at all obvious (especially when driving -- there is a lot of foot traffic) when you cross in a car but once you get out and start looking around, it's pretty obvious that it's pretty dam big (sorry about the pun, expect lots of them).

This first picture is of the four inlet towers on the Lake Mead side of the dam.

I tried a bunch of times to get a good picture of the dam showing its height but it's just to dam tall to do it from the ground. Here I am in Arizona looking into Nevada. There's also an hour time difference between the two sides so all announcements say both times.

Here is the Nevada generator room. The tour took us into it. The building in the upper left is used for flood control. Those doors are opened in the spring to drain excess water from Lake Mead due to snow melt. If you do some searching, you can find some spectacular pictures of them in operation.

Here are some towers for the power lines on the Arizona side. You can also see the piers for the new bridge that's being built to connect I-515 to I-40.

Here are both generator rooms. The turbulence in the water is the generator discharge.

Here is one of the feed tubes for the generators. There are two of these on each side of the dam. You can feel the room vibrate from the water flowing through these tubes. This particular tunnel was also used during construction to divert the Colorado around the work area (there were also three other tunnels used for that purpose). Photo credit to Mike Wood.

Here is the Nevada generator room. Each room holds eight generators. The big green thing at the top of the picture is one of two cranes used to service the generators. The other crane can be seen at the far end of the room.

This is a model of the generators.

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Last Updated 02/06/08 09:39:16 PM