Hoover Dam seeks ways to balance security and tourist attraction duties

Phil Hagen

Saturday, Sept. 6, 1997 | 11:37 a.m.

In the movie "Saboteur," the antagonist looks out his car window at Hoover Dam and coolly laments the unthinkable act of terrorism he must commit.

"I'm glad we came this way. It adds a few miles to our trip, but somehow I've become a little sentimental -- I want to take one last look at it. Beautiful, isn't it? A great monument to man's unceasing industry and to his stubborn faith in the future."

That was in 1942, when a young filmmaker named Alfred Hitchcock did what he did best: take our worst nightmare and make it seem real.

At the time, the fear of sabotage was everywhere. The world was at war, and evil forces lurked outside our borders -- and within, as Hitchcock dramatically illustrated.

That certainly hit home at the dam, just a few years after the great monument to our stubborn faith in the future had been completed.

Two machine-gun nests perched on the Black Canyon walls overlooked the Arizona side of the dam during the World War II era. There were gates at each entrance guarded by military police. Patrol boats monitored the waters. Guards from Camp Williston in Boulder City manned the perimeter. Local rangers helped provide escorts across the dam, 10 cars at a time, and they had the power to arrest tourists who got out of line.

"Get out of your car," Ranger Floyd Jenne once told a "wiseacre" who wouldn't close up the convoy.

"If you want me out, take me out," the guy replied.

Jenne, according to his oral history account in the Boulder City Library, grabbed the man by his feet and bounced him off the running board and onto the ground. With his hand on his gun, he ordered the man to his feet, then "shook him down."

"When we get into town, the chief might decide to let you off with a warning, but your car's gonna stay here and it's gonna be towed in," Jenne said.

Once the man paid for the tow, the chief let him off with a warning, all right: "OK, you're on your own, but do not try to cross the dam. If you want to get to Kingman, you go out through Searchlight and Needles."

It's probably safe to say that that brand of security wouldn't go over too well today. Times have changed: For one thing, a record 1.5 million visitors are expected to tour the dam by year's end.

But the fear of sabotage is drifting back into the American consciousness. There's a new war now, and its armies are virtually invisible -- until it's too late, as we're reminded by the bombings of the World Trade Center in New York, the federal building in Oklahoma City and Olympic Park in Atlanta.

"We're in a time that we don't really understand right now," said Sen. Harry Reid, D-Nev., who sits on several committees that deal with terrorism, including appropriations and public works. "When 200 innocent people are killed in the middle of our country ... it's hard to understand what's going on. But domestic terrorism is a very real threat."

It's perhaps even harder to understand what to do about it, especially at heavily visited monuments such as the White House, Mount Rushmore and Hoover Dam, places where Reid says "there's no bright line" to tell us how far to go with security measures. On one hand, they're national treasures; on the other, they're potential targets.

"When you're talking about a dam that's one of the manmade wonders of the world, it sure is a fabulous sight to see, and we don't want to do things to discourage that," said Walt Stowe, the local FBI assistant special agent in charge. "It's consistent with the problem we have in a free society in addressing terrorism: What steps do you take to harden your potential targets against potential terrorist activities and at the same time maintain the feeling of an open society, which we clearly are? It's an ongoing debate."

Every time Hoover Dam Chief of Police Ron Bayer steps outside his office, he's confronted by tourists with questions.

Where's the escalator? ... What time's the next tour? ... Where do we park?

"I can't go out for a cup of coffee without answering five or six questions," he says with a grin, walking among the milling visitors near the snack shop.

Like the other Bureau of Reclamation police officers around the dam, that's part of the job. But don't misread the laid-back atmosphere -- it's no department store, Bayer says. Most of the officers are retired law-enforcement officers or military veterans, with more than 15 years of experience each.

"Most of our guys are overqualified," says Bayer, a former New York City detective. "Things don't happen a lot, but if something does happen, we have people who know what they're doing. And they are all people who care about this place."

Since the Oklahoma City bombing in 1995, he's added security officers and some seasonal help has come from the Park Service. This October, when the new fiscal year begins, additional manpower is expected. (Those security numbers are not available, for security reasons.) Bayer will need the help; with his recent promotion to regional security officer, his duties were expanded to more than 20 facilities on the lower Colorado River.

But the dam also has "some great resources" in the FBI and its SWAT unit, Nellis Air Force Base -- whose services range from the Nuclear Emergency Search Team to a "bomb dog" -- and Metro Police. All have done training exercises at the dam.

If there is any good to come out of the Oklahoma City bombing, Bayer says, it's that it has "certainly raised the public consciousness, making everybody aware of how easy it is to do something like that."

At the dam, it led to further parking restrictions, such as large vehicles not being allowed in the new parking facility. Employees received new picture ID cards and started using a key-card system to gain access to dam offices, elevators and other critical access points. They also received a security briefing on keeping gates closed, locking things up, and "a big part of that is if they ever see somebody out of place, they'll call us and report it," Bayer says.

They've also started putting surveillance cameras around the area, some just in the last couple of weeks. There are cameras set up inside the new visitors center to monitor the tourists coming and going and others are outside, such as one perched atop the visitor center to keep an eye on boat traffic.

Bayer also plans to add a full-time guard to monitor the newly installed mimic board, which features screens that can show a dozen different camera angles at once, or combine to display one giant picture.

Engineers are also getting ready to build a buoy barrier on the downstream side to keep watercraft on the Colorado River from getting too close to the dam and its tunnels. The old sign that has issued the "Don't Go Beyond This Point" warning since World War II has faded almost beyond legibility.

"For a long time there wasn't that much concern," Bayer says, "but now we're ahead of many federal agencies."

One thing that could bolster the safety of the dam would be building a bypass around it, which would reroute much of the truck traffic.

"No question about it," Reid says. "Alleviating some of the larger truck traffic would make it safer."

But that idea has been bounced from drawing table to drawing table for several years and is now on hold. Like everything else, improvements that could increase security are often affected by politics and budget restraints. The decisions are not easy to make.

"You want to strike a balance in that you're not ignoring a potential threat, yet you're not going to go crazy and spend mass amounts of money," Bayer says.

In the meantime, domestic terrorism fears continue on the upswing, spurred by such news as the recent plot to blow up a New York City subway station and former National Security Adviser Anthony Lake writing a book called "Six Nightmares," one of which involves a nuclear terrorist blackmailing the U.S. government.

The Terrorism Research Center is on full alert. In an essay it offers on the World Wide Web, it states: "Since terrorists need publicity to inspire fear, familiarity causes them to seek more unusual events that capture and hold public attention."

Among the possible "spectacular attacks," it lists poisoning water and blowing up dams.

At 700 feet high and 660 feet thick, Hoover Dam is "a very difficult target," Bayer says. If there were an earthquake, for example, it would take a "7 to 8 on the Richter scale to even affect us."

But if a determined terrorist is going to try, Bayer says, what can you do? The old machine-gun bunkers still stand as reminders of one resort.

"We could be standing out there with M-16s, but the public doesn't want that."

But the options on the other side are "scary," he adds. "There are other things coming -- you can see it."

An eerie look into the future might have been the 1995 sarin gas attack in a Japanese subway. The responsible party allegedly also considered attacks on the United States.

What's also scary are the cheap recipes for making these latest weapons of terror. Whether terrorists used conventional, nuclear, chemical or biological weapons, Bayer estimates $2,000 as the maximum it would cost to wreak havoc with lives and property in a 1-kilometer area.

"That's not a good omen," Bayer says. "Somebody could be growing something right now in a petri dish somewhere. ... But what do you do, start wearing gas masks?"

Like the men who built the dam, Bayer's best answer is a stubborn faith in the future.

He points out statistics that show the number of bombings has decreased worldwide in the last few years, and that the mushrooming of the militia movement that everyone feared after the Oklahoma City bombing hasn't materialized.

"There are some things speaking positively for society," he says. "When you see this or that going on, you think there are nothing but nuts out there. But, luckily, they're still in the minority."

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