The Hoover Dam andVenezuela’s Electricity Crisis

The Hoover dam is located on the Nevada-Arizona border. The project was conceived just before the Great Depression; nevertheless, work on the dam began in 1931, and it was completed in 1936.

Note that it was completed in just five years. It is equipped with 17 generators that produce a maximum of 2,074 megawatts. Technically, it is classified as a concrete, arch-gravity dam.

The water impounded by the dam forms Lake Meade, which has a surface area of 639 square kilometers (250 square miles). Since then, it has served to deliver water from the Colorado River through agreements reached with the states of California, Arizona, Nevada, New Mexico, Utah and Wyoming.

Several of these states share desert surfaces. Hoover Dam is located within 50 kilometers of Las Vegas, and since its inauguration, has not stopped producing electricity, giving efficient service and, thus, presenting a tourist attraction that guarantees good revenue.

Today, it is listed in the National Register of Historic Places and is considered a magnificent example of Art Deco architecture.

You can visit the entire dam and see for yourself its efficiency, cleanliness, orderliness and elegance, which are the results of talent, discipline and civic consciousness.

In our country, on the other hand, well into the 21st century, they give us barges. After 12 years of shocking inefficiency and corruption, the big answer from the government to the electrical crisis they created is this: Hold the citizens themselves responsible and penalize them with fines that they cynically call “contributions” if they do not reduce consumption, demand the same from small businesses and push them to invest in plants in the hopes that the infrastructure needed to reliably provide the necessary fuel will somehow fall from the sky.

And finally, a spectacle that we Venezuelans cannot help but associate with backwardness, with poverty-stricken villages left to the wrath of God, with dug-outs paddling up the Arauca: power barges.

The barges are modern (purchased, incidentally, from the U.S., according to Ali Rodriguez) and are berthed in a few ports, where they provide a sort of mouth-to-mouth respiration to some plants which are surely obsolete thanks to the revolution. From there, assuming all goes well — a big assumption for any project involving this government — they will provide electricity through a transmission system that is also certainly obsolete — an event which is sure to be as exciting as the arrival of ice in Macondo [in Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s classic novel, “100 Years of Solitude”].

And this is happening in a country which has, among other things, the Guri Dam, a hydroelectric complex with a maximum capacity of 10,000 megawatts, the third largest in the world after Itaipu in Brazil and Three Gorges in China. Seven Lake Meads would fit into the Guri Reservoir.

But the Guri fell into the hands of the “revolution,” and, although great works of civil engineering can surely weather earthquakes and other natural disasters, they are no match for inept, corrupt and irresponsible governments.