We couldn't park in their parking lot next to the visitor center building because of the auxiliary fuel tank on the truck, while initially irritating, it ended up saving us $7 and only cost us the time to walk across the dam which we wanted to do anyway.
Hoover not only makes good vacuum cleaners, but good dams too. Splitting Arizona and Nevada, Hoover is a big boy, Dam big they say (depending on the tour guide you get you might hear about the Dam traffic, a Dam movie and so on, but our tour guide was pretty family friendly).
Some specs on this bad boy:
*726 ft tall
*1244 ft across
*660 ft thick at base, 45 ft at top (It's a big cement wedge shoved into this canyon)
*3.25 mil cubic yards cement
*Weight: 6.6 mil tons
It more than one-ups the Glen Canyon Dam as it has enough cement to make a 4 lane road from LA to Miami
over 4 billion kilowatt-hours a year - enough to serve 1.3 million people
A new bridge in construction to speed up traffic flow
Completed 2 years ahead of schedule and I'm guessing it has more than a few million tons of cement safety factor built in. The two most common questions at the dam: 1) How many people died during construction and 2) How many are buried in the cement. Answer: about 96 died, and no one buried in the cement (I figure it's about 96 that died since any buried in the cement aren't talking)
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