Hoover Dam: history, construction, and impact

Natural Resources

The Hoover Dam was built in the 1930s as a major infrastructure project to help create jobs during the Great Depression and to help meet the energy needs of a growing Southwest. The human population has grown considerably in the region since then, putting a strain on a number of different resources. The dam actually helped to facilitate an increase in the human population in Nevada, particularly in Las Vegas, by providing a source of electricity. The dam actually created a means of controlling the water supply along the Colorado River, which in turn allowed for a lot of the growth in the population of the area (ONE, 2014).

This growth has been a challenge to the local ecosystem, however. The Hoover Dam is located in the Mojave Desert, and desert ecosystems are typically quite fragile. A lot of this ecosystem has been overrun for urbanization that the Dam supports. The Dam was also built for flood control in California, to help with the irrigation of that state's agricultural lands (Crook & Fudge, 2010). Humans were also affected in terms of the development that the Dam brought to the area, which affected the local native peoples, so that they have to live quite different lives without the same river as before. They had to become more settled and aligned with Western life.

These interventions also create difficult for animals that might once have lived downstream along the Colorado River, as they would now have much less water available to them. There is a surplus of water at the dam site, but a lack of it downstream. There are several species that were affected during the construction of the Dam and later on as well, since the ecosystem has been changed by the way that the water has been changed. Many animals must have new migration patterns and find water elsewhere due to the changes in the river.