Nevada

Way down in southern Nevada, on the border with Arizona, lies Hoover Dam. It creates Lake Mead, supplies water to Las Vegas, and produces electricity for Nevada, Arizona, and Southern California. It was a huge construction project (the largest concrete structure in the world at the time), built in the depression of the 1930s. Laborers flocked to the project, even though the work was hard, summer temperatures were extreme, and wages were slim.

Lake Mead is currently only fifty percent full, and has been dropping ten feet a year since 2000, due to reduced flow of the Colorado River, which in turn is a result of diminished snowpack in the Colorado mountains. If the drought continues, Las Vegas will soon suffer a severe water shortage, and Lake Mead — the largest man-made reservoir in the U.S. — will dry up entirely by 2021, according to researchers.

Political trivia: The dam was originally named Boulder Dam, after a planned location in Boulder Canyon. The name stuck, even when the project was relocated to Black Canyon. Then, as construction began, the name was changed to Hoover Dam to honor then-president Herbert Hoover, who had played an important role (as Secretary of Commerce) in getting the project started.

But Hoover lost the 1932 presidential election to Franklin Delano Roosevelt, whose Secretary of the Interior, Harold Ickes, quickly removed Hoover's name from the dam and reverted it to Boulder Dam. It was fifteen years later, after Ickes had retired, that Congress, by near-unanimous vote, restored the name Hoover Dam, the name by which it has been known ever since.