Pat's View: Inspirational Stories

The mighty Colorado river, known historically for its disastrous Spring time floods, zigzags from the gleaming snowcapped mountains of Colorado southward all the way to Mexico. There, it finally empties into the Gulf of California. The lofty dreams of actually wrangling and harvesting the flood waters that would produce power and reclaim the bleak wastelands of the dessert began with the construction of a railroad that would carry essential supplies to the site of what would later be called the Hoover Dam. The angry claws of the Great Depression left people jobless and desperate. Unemployed Americans rushed to the bleak wilderness to claim jobs that would employ 21,000 people to build the “world’s largest dam”. It was a whopping 60 stories tall and at the time it was finished the highest dam in the world! The base of the dam was as thick as two football fields. Can you imagine that? But the dam had to be huge in order to withstand the pressure of all that water. It was an unbelievable feat of engineering!!