Jake Dieleman was one of the original “Thirty-oners”, employed during the construction of the Hoover Dam between 1931 and 1936 as a high scaler, and crane, derrick, and cableway operator. It is particularly appropriate, therefore, that the company that Jake established in 1946 – Las Vegas based Jake’s Crane & Rigging – should have been called upon to help with a new bridge construction project on the Hoover Dam Highway bypass.

Mark Sovocool, director of engineering and fabrication at Jake’s Crane, says that his company’s cranes will be on site for 10 months although the highway will not be completed until 2007.

A pair of Jake’s Crane & Rigging cranes are working on the piers for the highway, removing dirt for new piers to be erected. The cranes are a Jake’s-redesigned Link Belt TG 1900 tower crane, and – to erect it – an SL 400 truck crane that Jake’s Crane designed, built, used once, and then sold 14 years ago. It has now retaken ownership of this crane, whose first job was putting up the Link Belt tower crane.

The 600m bridge spans the Colorado River, and Jake’s erected its TG tower gantry crane on either bank. On the Nevada side, the SL 400 had to be set up on the edge of a cliff, 200m above the canyon floor.

Cliff soundness tested

Jake Dieleman’s son and president of Jake’s Crane & Rigging, Bob, conducted extensive testing to check out the tipping load before booming out, and took the controls for the lift himself. “When you are on a cliff, there are a lot of things you don’t know. You have an idea, but you don’t know for sure how sound the cliff is. We had to be really careful,” he says. As it turned out, the SL 400 performed perfectly, he adds.

The weight of traffic on the Hoover Dam route made the new highway essential. The current two-lane highway, US 93, across the dam can no longer handle the 14,000 vehicles and trucks crossing each day – double the volume of 15 years ago. The highway is the major commercial route between the states of Arizona, Nevada, and Utah.

The US Federal Highway Administration received Federal and State (Nevada and Arizona) money to complete the design and construction of the Hoover Dam Highway project. The new river crossing is a four-lane highway in a 3.5-mile corridor beginning in Clark County, Nevada, then crossing the Colorado River 1,500ft down stream of the dam, and terminating in Mohave County, Arizona.