"Aren't you out tomorrow?" Jeremy asked.
Fred shook his head. "No, that's next week."
Fred had scheduled a few days off. He had accrued too many days of vacation, and if he did not use them by the end of June, he would lose them. He had lost unused vacation days before, something that bothered his wife more than him.
"Where are you going?" Jeremy asked.
Fred moaned. "Nowhere special. The wife wants me to take her to see the inside of the new casinos. There are a couple of new ones that've been open for over a year that she still hasn't seen. The inside of one of them is supposed to be pretty cool. Least that's what she's heard. You been in 'em yet?"
Jeremy shook his head. "Nah, I spend all of my gambling time downtown. The odds are better in the smaller casinos."
"You gamble? I thought technical folks didn't gamble."
"I dabble. Craps is a statistics game. If you know the rules and when to bet, you can increase your odds."
Fred laughed. "You can increase your odds even more if you don't gamble."
Fred looked over Jeremy's shoulder at one of the readouts. "Did you turn down Parker?"
"Yeah, about an hour ago."
Parker and Davis Dams were downstream from Hoover, but Fred's group controlled both via microwave communication from the Hoover control center. Davis Dam, almost seventy miles downstream from Hoover, created Lake Mojave, and Parker Dam, another ninety miles farther, created Lake Havasu. Hoover of course, held back Lake Mead, the largest man-made lake in the United States. At over 110 miles long, with 9.3 trillion gallons, Lake Mead would cover the state of Pennsylvania with a foot of water. From the control room where they sat, Fred controlled the lion's share of the water in the lower Colorado River system.
"No adjustment requests for Davis yet this evening?" asked Fred.
"Not yet, but I expect one any minute," Jeremy replied.
Fred turned to go. "All right, I'm gonna take a break for dinner."
"Okay, boss."
Fred took his lunch box from his desk in the control room and ambled down two stories of stairs out of the central plant. Walking through a hallway deep in the heart of the dam, he came to the elevator. He used his personal key to call it, then waited for it to arrive. He would have dinner on top tonight. He needed some air and wanted to enjoy what was left of the sun. The elevator took a few minutes to cover the six hundred vertical feet to the top of the dam. Unlike elevators in high-rise office buildings, he could feel this one accelerate up to speed. He was glad his wife wasn't with him. It would have made her nauseous. When the doors opened, he shielded his eyes. He had forgotten his sunglasses. He stepped out of the elevator and made sure the elevator was locked.
Summers were always crowded at Hoover. Over a million people visited the dam annually. Since there were no major bridges across the Colorado River in the area, US-93 used Hoover as the bridge between Nevada and Arizona. The result was millions more people crossing the dam each year in cars.
Fred waited for a break in the traffic, and then crossed to the upstream side of the dam. He then headed west toward the Nevada shore, where the visitor center was located. His walk was on a slightly elevated sidewalk with a concrete rail to keep him from falling into the lake. The walk along the rail offered a spectacular view of Lake Mead. Every now and then, Fred had to step down off the sidewalk into the road to get around a family or groups of tourists looking over the handrail. As he walked, he passed a concrete walkway that went straight out into the lake on his right. The walkway, blocked by a chain, led to two huge column-shaped towers. The first tower was about one hundred feet away from the dam and the second another hundred feet beyond the first.
The two towers, and the two just like them on the Arizona side, were intake towers. Their purpose was to collect the water being routed to the turbines for generating electricity. The towers did not pull water from the surface, however. They pulled water from two inlets at depths of two hundred fifty feet and three hundred fifty feet. Pulling water from those depths avoided sucking fish and other debris into the turbines.
When Fred neared the west end of the dam, he followed the edge of the dam around to the right. The sidewalk now took him away from the bulk of the crowds and past the old visitor center on his left and the snack bar on his right. Walking through the employee parking lot, he was now headed upstream on the Nevada bank of Lake Mead. The Nevada intake towers were still on his right. Up in front of him on the other side of the parking lot was the Nevada spillway.
He found a bench that offered a good view of the spillway and the lake, then opened his lunchbox. He inspected the contents, wondering what kind of sandwich his wife had made, and was pleasantly surprised to find tuna. She must have run out of lunchmeat, the usual.
As Fred ate, he studied the spillway. The tops of the spillways were twenty-seven feet below the crest of the dam. Each spillway, one on the Nevada side and one on the Arizona side, fed enormous fifty-foot-diameter spillway tunnels that disappeared into the canyon walls and exited at river level downstream from the dam. In front of each spillway tunnel was a large trough or ditch about one hundred fifty feet long with concrete walls on both sides to keep water out until the levels rose high enough to flow over, or spill into the spillways. In fact, Hoover's spillways were equipped with metal gates that rose automatically with high water, forcing the water another sixteen feet higher before it was allowed to flow into the spillways.
Since the dam was built in 1935, only twice had the water been high enough to flow into the spillways: once, when the dam was first filled, and again in 1983, when high snowmelt in Utah and Colorado caused both Lake Powell and Lake Mead water levels to rise.
Fred had witnessed 1983. Lake Mead had risen high enough that four feet of water flowed over the metal gates into the spillways for 60 days. He remembered it as quite a spectacle. During that year the Nevada and Arizona spillways together dumped twenty eight thousand cubic feet per second of water, more than doubling the normal Hoover Dam output. This, however, was less than five percent of the capacity of the spillways, which together could theoretically handle about four hundred thousand cubic feet per second, although that had never been tested.
As Fred studied the spillways, he wondered what it would be like to see them perform to their potential. That was why he ate here. He liked to imagine seeing that much water blasting down the huge hole. Just thinking about it made him shiver. He wondered if he would dare stand so close, or whether he would feel inclined to stand back a little. Although he considered it unlikely, he wondered if Hoover's spillways would ever reach their potential. Maybe a huge flood in the Rocky Mountains would do it, but it would have to be a big one.
After Fred finished his sandwich, he stood and walked over to the fence. He looked right down the fifty-foot hole. He'd give anything to see the spillways at their full capacity. After staring for a few minutes, he blinked, then turned and walked away, back toward the dam. Unfortunately, it didn't matter how bad Fred wanted to see it, because there was no way it would ever happen in his lifetime.
CHAPTER 4
As the man's car rounded the hill, the car in front slowed on the descent, forcing him to slow as well. As both cars drove onto the bridge, he glanced left and got his first good look at Glen Canyon Dam, his first look in the last several months anyway. It was always impressive, even though he couldn't see all six hundred feet down to the river from his angle on the bridge.