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.

Our tour guide suggested the true number was probably closer to 400; in order to avoid paying death benefits, they didn’t count any deaths which occurred off-site (e.g. someone collapses from CO poisoning and is taken to hospital, cause of death declared as pneumonia)