Into the belly of the beast

By Jeremy Twitchell

Thursday, Sept. 4, 2008 | midnight

For six years, a long elevator ride that dropped 54 stories and a quick pass through the dam power plant were the only parts of Hoover Dam that tour guides were allowed to show off.

But in October, the dam managers at the Bureau of Reclamation added the Dam Tour, which for a few extra dollars, allows visitors to catch a glimpse of the dam's guts, including miles of tunnel (eight to be exact) and stairways that reach as far as the eye can see.

(By the way, if you're tired of the dam puns, a visit to the marvel that Hoover built may not be for you — you can expect to be greeted by a dam parking guide, directed to the dam visitor's center, sold a dam ticket and, well, you get the idea.)

Although Hoover Dam is only a short ride from Henderson, many residents have never toured the dam, and even those who have might not have seen parts of the dam that for years were closed to the public after the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks.

From its opening in 1937 to Sept. 10, 2001, the dam offered a hard-hat tour that gave visitors the works: a look at the dam's interior, a tour of the power plant floor and a look at the bowels of the dam where the Colorado River spins the turbines.

But security concerns in the wake of the terrorist attacks ended all tours briefly; an abbreviated version returned in November 2001 that allowed visitors to go down to the power plant and look at it from an overhead walkway. But the hard-hat tour was eliminated.

"Over time, people were looking for something more than what we were doing, so (the Dam Tour) was in many ways a response to visitor comments," said William Schermerhorn, customer service manager at the dam.

Before 2006, he said, "we felt we did a great job with what we had to work with, but we got a lot of feedback from people saying, 'Hey, we used to be able to do this and that.'"

Since their introduction in October, Schermerhorn said, demand has pushed the number of daily Dam Tours from two to 15. Tight fits in the tunnels and elevators the tour path follows limit the tour to 20 people, meaning that only 300 of the up to 3,000 visitors the dam gets each day can go on the Dam Tour.

Schermerhorn said spots in the Dam Tours are first-come, first-serve, and sell out almost every day.

He said he is excited to have the new tour available, but if you press him or one of the volunteer tour guides — who have all taken the original hard-hat tour just in case they ever need to conduct it for a visiting dignitary — they'll admit that it's a mere shadow of the original hard-hat tour.

"Even though it doesn't compare to the old hard-hat, I get nothing but positive responses," tour guide and Henderson resident Fred Rivera said.

The Dam Tour begins with a larger group of 80 people taking the basic power plant tour, but splits off at the end to continue its exploration.

Rivera, every bit the dry wit who's comfortable spouting off dam puns (he's also a retired electrical engineer, just for a dash of credibility) doesn't seem fatigued as he leads the tour that he's led hundreds of times.

"Last year, my wife thought I was getting underfoot at home and shooed me out," he said. "It's been a wonderful experience here; when I started, I would tell people that I was 69 years old. Now I tell them that I'm 70 years young."

The Dam Tour begins in the 705 Tunnel — a long, narrow tunnel with a polished floor. The tunnel, named for its elevation measured from the bottom of the dam, appeared in the movie "Transformers," Rivera told the group before inviting its members to give a couple shouts just to see how well the tunnel carries and echo.

He's not exaggerating — at the distant other end of the tunnel, the radio music playing on speakers at the beginning of the tunnel is still just as loud as it was when the group entered.

One floor up, he showed the group a tunnel that Chevy Chase made famous in the movie "Vegas Vacation," and took the tourists through it for a peek out of one of the ventilation shafts on the dam's face.

Doubling back and following another small tunnel — this one armed with seismic sensors to monitor potential earthquake activity — he led the group to the "Stairway to Heaven," a straight staircase that reaches up as far as the eye can see, then curves away out of site.

Rivera nodded to an identical staircase behind him, which leads down to the pumps at the bottom of the dam.

"The mechanics that had to go down there each day to run the pumps have another name for that one, but it wouldn't be politically correct for me to say it," he said.

For the record, Schermerhorn later noted, he's not aware of any workers ever having to use the staircase. The space is used to collect water that seeps in on the edge of the dam, and the staircase is only there for inspections, he said. The only time he's ever seen someone use them, he said, is when he got curious one day and followed the staircase from the top of the dam to the bottom, then back up.

(He counted 717 steps from the top until the water that pools at the bottom blocked him from going deeper, and the round trip took 45 minutes, in case you're wondering.)

After seeing the massive staircase, Rivera ends the tour by leading the group to the top of the dam, where visitors are treated to a sweeping vista of the Colorado River shooting out of the turbines and continuing its journey.

"This is an exciting place," he said. "It really is. You learn something new every day."

Schermerhorn said the point of the tours and all the exhibits is to educate, but there's much more to the tour than hard facts about the dam.

"Ninety percent of what we do is customer service, not just spitting out information," he said.

Punctuating that, he offered to take a picture for a nearby tourist so that the man could join his wife next to the mannequin of a dam worker.

"We want you to be in there with her so that you can prove she takes you places," he quipped as he snapped the photo.

Of course, there's a downside to all that friendly public relations work — keeping a straight face and coming up with a kind answer to some really, really dumb questions.

Schermerhorn's heard some doozies. But the worst?

"People standing on the dam, asking me where the dam is," he said.

He gives them the benefit of the doubt (there's that customer service shining through), and offered up the excuse that the dam can look like a bridge when you're on it.

Another?

"'Is the dam man-made?' I've been asked that," he said.

Talk about a silly dam question.

Jeremy Twitchell is a reporter for the Home News. He can be reached at 990-8928 or [email protected].