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NO ONE IS BURIED IN HOOVER DAM Daniel Rosenberg The most frequently asked question of tour guides at Hoover Dam is how many people are buried in the dam. Visitors are surprised to learn that the answer is none. People like to believe in tall tales, legends and myths, and this seems to be the one for Hoover Dam. The story of workers being buried in the dam has been around for a very long time, it originated when Hoover Dam was being built in the 1930’s. Tourists would come and watch the dam being built, and they felt compelled to humanize the dam by concocting wild stories about its builders and the hair-raising dangers they faced. One of these stories was the myth of men buried alive in the concrete. But this is just a story. —U.S. Bureau of Reclamation There is a technical story they tell about the Hoover Dam. Historians tell it. Reporters tell it. And the Bureau of Reclamation honors it as a point of faith. No one is buried in the Hoover Dam.1 A variety of proofs are offered up.The concrete was poured in this and that way. No one could ever have fallen in. Everyone who ever did fall in was pulled out. And even if he wasn’t, someone got back to him later. Once someone’s boots were found in the dam. But it turned out to be a joke. It was just some boots.2 As one architectural historian explains it, “The often told tale of workers buried in the concrete during construction is apocryphal; the tolerances of the concrete could never stand such a messy water-filled object.”3 But the story springs up over and over, as if it had a life of its own. Tour 5 guides find themselves parrying the question so often that they lead off tours with a denial. The dam is supposed to be the site where American humanity conquered nature. In order for the dam to be what it is supposed to be, it must first not be a tomb. The dam killed. There is no question about that. It killed in diverse and gruesome ways. Some workers fell from cliffs, some from the dam. Many were struck by falling tools or pipes. Some had accidents with air guns, others with explosives, still others were hit by trucks or swinging cables. A handful were electrocuted. During the first summer of construction, fourteen died from dehydration.4 The first recorded fatality at the dam was a man by the name of J. G. Tierney, a surveyor for the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation. He died in 1922. The last recorded death was that of Patrick W. Tierney of the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation. He died in 1935, thirteen years to the day after his father. Between 1922 and 1935, 114 people lost their lives at the dam site. None of them are buried in the dam. There are numerous specific instances of workers not buried in the dam. On November 8, 1933, for example, W. A. Jameson had the bad luck to find himself in front of a hundred tons of falling concrete. In an instant, he was swept from the side of the dam and crushed on the canyon floor. Searchers worked for hours, finding nothing more than “an ugly mound of wet concrete studded with gagged fragments of lumber and pipe.” It took most of a day of digging and untangling before Jameson’s shattered corpse was finally recovered. W. A. Jameson is not buried in the dam.5 Despite the fact that he was a very good candidate for it, Ike Johnson isn’t buried in the dam either. On the night of January 3, 1934, he and Happy Pitts were standing on a form waiting for a twenty-ton bucket of concrete. The bucket arrived, but before they could begin unloading it, a cable broke, knocking the two of them off into space. It didn’t take long to find Happy’s body. He had fallen 150 feet straight down. Ike, on the other hand, seemed to have gone up in thin air. For a time, workers searched the canyon floor with no success, when finally someone noticed “a tiny flicker of flame halfway up the towering face of the dam.” When workers arrived, they found Ike “reposing on his back on a narrow catwalk, holding a lighted match aloft like a fallen Goddess...

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