The Waterbury Democrat., 1935-04-11

of the mampOth protect. By OREN ARNOLD
 NEA Service Special Correspond. cnt
 | Boulder City, Nov, April II - Imagine one continuous freight train with its engine in St. Louis and its caboose in New York city "a distance of 1,O65 miles.
 That will give you an approxi- mate picture of the number of carloads of materials necessary to complete Boulder Dam. l If the United States Bureau of Re cla m i n had deliberately searched for more inaccessible spot to build the worlds biggest dam, 1t couldn't have done much II better than to select Black Canyon on the Colorado river. N It chose this spot, of course. through geographic expediency, but | 1t became e-and-seek for the l material men and the transporta- I tion committees.
 Nobody had thought to build 8 city near the site of Boulder Dam. Nearby was little Indian village, but most of the white inhabitants of the region lived in communities 1 not dozens, but hundreds of miles l away.
 CITY HAS MAGICAL RISE
 The first thing necessary, there- fore, was to build some railroads l and then beget town. This was done, in miracle fashion. Boulder City, where all the workmen and their families live, where the offices and all general working headquarters are housed, is now the third largest city in Nevada, where only barren plain was. five years ago. Then the builders were ready to take out and take in materials.
 They took out 9,000,00O tons of rock, first. Few minds can envi- sion that. But you could build a masonry fence 2,500 miles long with it.
 ACCOMPLISH HUGE TASKS
 Then they dug more than a mill lion cubic yards of dirt from the
 
 ditch 100 feet wide, GO feet deep, and mile long.
 Pretty soon the workmen were filling up the hole they had made (they dug the dirt out, of course, to get to bedrock and have a firm foundation for the damp, and were doing it with concrete. They will have used 4,0O0,000 cubic yards of 1t when the work is fin- ished. With the concrete used in Boulder Dam, you could build a 20-foot paved highway all the way from Florida to California. Of course this had to be rein forced, but mere 35,000 tons of l steel was necessary.
 1000 MILES OF PIPE Cement, however, creates great quantities of heat as it hardens, so the builders had to devise a huge refrigeration system, with l pipes running back and forth all through the dam. eff this weren't done, the great mass would take more than 100 years to cool, and set up dangerous stresses while about itD
 These pipes, and others use d, totaled thousands of miles. Steel pipe alone was more than 1000 miles.
 More than 165,000 carloads of sand, cobbles, and gravel had to be hauled in to be mixed with the 5,000,000 barrels of cement used.
 This couldn't be mixed by hand, nor could many of the other big scale operations there be done by hand; therefore, great quantities of special machinery were used. So far, about 900 cars of hydrau- lie machinery alone have b e e n brought in.
 Fifty-two miles of standard | guage railroad track weaves in and around, up and down. at Boulder Dam. GAS BILLS ENORMOUS
 About 300 carloads of materials were arriving each day at the dam when work was at It's peak. Every minute, night and day, even now, locomotives are shunting cars around and hooks on cables are picking up cars as if they were toys, moving them up or down.
 When work was moving fast est, the contractors had gasoline bills of nearly $50,000 a month, and tire bills of $16,000.
 If you need a thumb tack for your work at Boulder Dam, you can get 1t from the supply house instantly. Or if you need a 20- ton truck or even whole freight train, you can get that. too. But there is no waste, no disorder, nc confusion.
 It has taken as much American geni8s to estimate. purchase; and bring in the materials for Boul- der Dam as it has actually to build the great structure.
 NEXT: The men who made the dam. The fun they had. The lives that were lost. The big boss. Drama, adventure, thrills and folklore.
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