They lacked sufficient resources even in combination with their longtime partners, Morrison-Knudsen, which employed the nation’s leading dam builder, Frank Crowe. The Wattis Brothers, heads of the Utah Construction Company, were interested in bidding on the project, but lacked the money for the performance bond. The contractor had seven years to build the dam, or penalties would ensue. A $2 million bid bond was to accompany each bid the winner would have to post a $5 million performance bond. The dam was described in minute detail, covering 100 pages of text and 76 drawings. The government was to provide the materials but the contractor was to prepare the site and build the dam. On January 10, 1931, the Bureau made the bid documents available to interested parties, at five dollars a copy. The wedge-shaped dam would be 660 ft (200 m) thick at the bottom, narrowing to 45 ft (14 m) at the top, leaving room for a highway connecting Nevada and Arizona. The curving arch of the dam would transmit the water’s force into the abutments, in this case the rock walls of the canyon. The monolithic dam would be thick at the bottom and thin near the top, and would present a convex face towards the water above the dam. Officials eventually decided on a massive concrete arch-gravity dam, the design of which was overseen by the Bureau’s chief design engineer John L. Even before Congress approved the Boulder Canyon Project, the Bureau of Reclamation was considering what kind of dam should be used.
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