michael_nielsen

Visiting the Hoover Dam feels to me like visiting a rift into an alternate timeline—one in which we attempt enormous, absurd, starry-eyed projects… and achieve them, under budget and years ahead of schedule! I’d love to better understand the forces which made that possible.

Interesting/macabre to contemplate industrial accidents during construction. The exact number of fatalities seems to be somewhat difficult to track down, but the record here (broken down quite a bit) suggests the number was about 100 or so: https://www.usbr.gov/lc/hooverdam/history/essays/fat1935.html …

That's an extraordinary (& incredibly tragic) number - one hundred or so people who died due to falls, machinery accidents, in blasts, heat etc. Heat prostration alone was 13(!) people.

I wonder at how many more were injured, perhaps permanently disabled? Seems likely to have been many hundreds with major injuries.

Would be great to understand the trend over time. Many more than that died building the transcontinental railroad in the US (although that was a bigger project). Thousands died building the Panama Canal (mostly from improperly handled dynamite, as I recall).

In fact, *tens* of thousands died *failing* to build the Canal, in a previous, abandoned effort by a French private company in the late 1800s (before the US Army stepped in to build it in the 20th century). A lot of those were from the tropical diseases of malaria & yellow fever

brings this @cyantist thread to mind re China being willing to accept casualties in exchange for progress and the US not being willing to make the same trade:https://twitter.com/cyantist/status/1184867697051361280?s=20 …