We used to vacation at Lake Mead when I was a kid, so I’ve been through the Hoover Dam tour a few times already. It used to be pretty low-key: you’d just park your car and walk around, and lean over the edge as far as you dared. Now there are security checkpoints on both sides, which I might’ve expected; but also a four-story parking garage; at least three gift shops; a restaurant and snackbar; a new viewing platform which is only accessible if you’re willing to pony up for the multimedia tour and to walk through a series of metal detectors, which I wasn’t; and you can’t lean over the edge anymore because they’ve built big concrete barriers to prevent you from doing that. They also appear to be building another completely separate bridge across the canyon above the dam, which I predict will cause a lot of traffic accidents because it’s going to have a really great view. Unless they build big concrete barriers to prevent you from seeing the dam from the bridge, which come to think of it is just the sort of asinine thing they would do, isn’t it?
It’s because the Arizona “authorities” are still in a hysterical panic over 9/11. They are absolutely convinced that crazed Arabs will drive a homemade nuke in a U-Haul truck into the middle of the dam and set it off. Try driving a rented moving truck across the dam…it WILL be searched, replete with dogs and armed soldiers threatening you. And God help you if you look Arabic and have a Middle-Eastern sounding name.
this is also a major reason why they are magically coming up with the $100-million-plus needed for the bypass bridge. A bridge to take the US 93 traffic off the dam top has been discussed for decades…suddenly, hey howdy, we’ve got the money! Interesting all the obscure little things that 9/11 brought about. Due to paranoia, sorry to say.
(read more at http://www.hooverdambypass.org/)
Sorry Dan, it’s just that Arizona sucks.
Without venturing any opinion as to the relative suckitude of Arizona, but agreeing with you wholeheartedly about the general level of hysteria and rearranging of deck chairs lately —
I guess I would say that I can see this as one of the more plausible terrorist targets, just from a symbolism and dramatic-statements point of view. A little security and paranoia there might be justified, even, at least compared to most of the random places people are sending 9/11 “security” money to. I was mostly just surprised by how wildly the structure around the dam had changed, what with the parking garages and gift shops and elevators and all. (And those were all on the NV side. :) They’ve even shoved the old art-deco winged-whatever-they-were Hansen figures over to one corner, and wrapped them in a audio-recorded poetry thing of some kind. Weird.
It’s a dam. It’s a big, f’ing hunk of concrete. Get a clue. A truck bomb, on top of it and uncontained, will explode UP and do very little damage.
Sheesh.
Maybe so. I really don’t have the engineering expertise to be able to guess.
Look, I mostly agree with you: I think we’re wasting ridiculous amounts of money on “security” efforts that are all for show, or on protecting obscure “targets” that no terrorist would bother with in a million years. I don’t like what the level of paranoia is doing to American society, I don’t like how our government has taken advantage of that paranoia to pass restrictive laws and take bizarre actions that would never be considered acceptable if we were thinking clearly, and I especially don’t like the fact that we’ve been reacting in exactly the way most likely to encourage more terrorist attacks. (If we’d all just gone on with our lives after 9/11, if we’d mourned our dead and then carried on as if nothing had happened, then no more terrorism. Because if it produces no terror, there’s no point in doing it.) I’m a raving moonbat civil-liberties-loving anti-bush tree-hugging soft-on-terrah librul, in other words.
But.
If there were going to be a major terrorist attack, it’d most likely be against something symbolic. (A 9/11 plane could’ve crashed into the Indian Point nuclear power plant, probably making Manhattan uninhabitable — but they went for the symbolic WTC instead.) Hoover Dam is just about the biggest symbolic target I can think of. If there’s any place in America that does deserve some extra security, this is it. There are a thousand things I’d do differently — I’d feel better about it if they pulled everybody over, instead of just waving the white guys through, for example — but this is one of the few places on this whole trip where I didn’t actively resent the fact that I was being routed through a security checkpoint.