Father and son died on the same day, 14 years apart while working on Hoover Dam
Father and son died on the same day, 14 years apart while working on Hoover Dam
The first person to die fell to his death on December 20, 1922. The last person to die fell to his death December 20, 1933. They were father and son.
The Hoover Dam had some tragic coincidences
After a three-decade absence from Pripyat, the brothers revisit their toy car, a poignant reminder of the Chernobyl Nuclear disaster that occurred between 1986 and 2016. Tuesday marks a somber date in Sharon Tierney’s family history, and she plans to observe it the way she usually does. Each year around Dec. 20, the Nevada City, California, woman delivers fresh flowers to the grave of her beloved great-grandmother. Then she spends the rest of the day remembering two men she never knew who “died to make the desert bloom.” Even after 81 years, stubborn myths still cling to the colossal construction effort that built Hoover Dam. Despite what you may have heard, no workers are entombed in the concrete structure. The hardhat was not invented there. But the most incredible story about the project is absolutely true. On Dec. 20, 1921, a crew surveying locations for the dam got caught in a flash flood, and a man named John Gregory Tierney was lost forever in the raging Colorado River, one of the first casualties of the project. Then on Dec. 20, 1935, 14 years later to the day, the job site suffered its last fatal accident, when a worker fell to his death from one of the two intake towers on the Arizona side of Black Canyon. That man was Patrick William Tierney, J.G. Tierney’s only son. Their names appear in raised metal on a plaque near the dam, never to be forgotten. Sharon thinks the name Marie Elizabeth Tierney Sherer also belongs on a plaque somewhere. “To me, she’s the story. Here she lost her husband and her son on the same date,” Sharon said of her great-grandmother. “She had a hard time about it the rest of her life. She was always very quiet on Dec. 20.” ‘THE WORK WILL GO ON’ John Gregory Tierney, or J.G. for short, was born May 20, 1885, in Piedmont, Missouri, the sixth child in what Sharon Tierney called a “very strong Irish Catholic family.” Like his namesake Irish grandfather, he made his career as a hard-rock miner — work that would carry him to Idaho, then Arizona and finally to a survey camp on the bank of the Colorado River in Boulder Canyon. According to family lore, J.G. and Marie met on a train during her return trip to boarding school after the holiday break. She never made it back to school. The two were married on May 7, 1909, when she was just 15. Their son, Patrick, was born the following summer in St. Louis. The couple later had a daughter named Alice, but she contracted measles and died at 3 while the family was living in the southeastern Arizona mining town of Morenci, Sharon said. Not long after that, the Tierneys moved to northwestern Arizona, where J.G. found work with the survey crew searching for a suitable spot to dam the Colorado. It took almost two weeks for the news of his death to reach Las Vegas from the remote work site. “The Colorado was just an unfettered river all the way from the Grand Canyon to Yuma,” said historian Dennis McBride, director of the Nevada State Museum in Las Vegas. “It would have been a wild river with terrific flooding.” paramedic firefighter. Both Marie and Hazel eventually remarried, but Marie never had any more children. Hazel died in 1989 at age 75. Marie died in 1976 at 82. She never quite got over losing “her Greg,” Sharon said. “He was the big love of her life.” SORROW TURNED TO PRIDE On the Nevada side of Black Canyon, near Oskar J.W. Hansen’s famous Winged Figures of the Republic, another sculpture depicts a man waist deep in water with his arms stretched toward the heavens. Hansen created it as a tribute to those who went to work on the dam and never came home — a number that reached 213, including those who died of natural causes and in nonconstruction-related ways. The inscription reads: “They died to make the desert bloom.” The official death toll from construction accidents at the site was 96, but the real number was undoubtedly higher, said McBride, author of several books on Hoover Dam and Boulder City. Accidents went unreported. Injured workers who died at hospitals or at home were not classified as workplace fatalities. “Basically they didn’t count you as dying unless you were killed on the spot,” McBride said. “There is no dependable number. There just isn’t.” History does record this much: The Tierney men’s deaths book-ended a project that calmed a notoriously volatile river and helped give rise to the modern Southwest. With Hoover as its linchpin, the Colorado now supplies water and power to some 30 million people and irrigates $1.5 billion a year in crops. The Las Vegas Valley draws 90 percent of its drinking water from the reservoir behind the dam. “I’m proud, still proud of the work my family did on the Hoover Dam,” Sharon Tierney said. “Although some people see it as a big tragedy, I’m very proud of that connection.” McBride said he doesn’t know of another historical coincidence quite like the one that afflicted the Tierney family. All you can do is marvel at it, he said. “The myths you can explain. (They) usually have some basis in fact,” McBride said. “Here is a fact that has no explanation. The thing that cannot be explained is the very thing that happened.”Thank you for reading. Bookmarks us for more info.
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