Hoover Dam

Hoover Dam

Hoover Dam is located in the Black Canyon on the Colorado River on the Arizona-Nevada border. It is impounding the Lake Mead, which stretches 185 km upstream and is the world's largest man-made lake. The dam is used for flood and silt control, hydropower generation, irrigation for agriculture and domestic water supply. It is also an important tourist attraction, with around seven million visitors a year, almost a million of whom hike through the dam. The dam was built between 1931 and 1936, during the Great Depression, and dedicated by President Franklin D. Roosevelt on 30 September 1935. Its construction was the result of the enormous efforts of thousands of workers. The top of the dam, which was previously used as a crossing of the Colorado River for U.S. Route 93, has two lanes available for automobile traffic, but after the September 11 terrorist attacks, authorities raised security concerns and the Hoover Dam Bypass project was accelerated. The Hoover Dam opened to visitors after its completion in 1937, but after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941, it was closed to the public when the United States entered World War II, during which time only authorized traffic was allowed in convoys. It reopened after the war on 2 September 1945, and by 1953 had 448 081 visitors a year. They built a new visitor center in 1995, and the following year the number of visitors exceeded one million for the first time. The dam was closed to the public again on 11 September 2001, and modified tours were re-launched in December, with a new "Discovery Tour" added the following year.