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Copyright University of Nevada Oral History Program 2002 We encourage researchers to use this material. To view our use policy, please check our Web site or call us at 775/784/6932. Carl Merrill: I agree that the safety was stressed heavily, but most of us didn’t pay any attention to it. Now, I don’t remember ever going to a safety meeting. And the story goes that if you got hurt in Nevada, you better get to Arizona as fast as you could. You’d get fixed up over there because the compensation was much better in Arizona than it was in Nevada at that time. I, too, remember having scarlet fever. And the pesthouse that I was in was on Avenue Y, pretty near down to the sewage disposal plant. I was in there for 30 days. You’re pretty sick for 2 or 3 days, and then after that you just got to weather it out. I remember going to the hospital, and this is something most of us tried to avoid, because if you’d get something that wasn’t quite up to snuff and you went to the hospital for it, you were liable to get kicked off the job. And you needed that job. I remember walking across the second floor of the power house on the Arizona side one time; I wasn’t paying attention to what I was doing. One leg slipped into a hole, and I landed on this side of my ribs. Well, I didn’t dare go to the doctor; I suffered it out, you know. And I think this happened in many, many cases- -that people didn’t report their hurts and their illnesses. I think they thought that was the thing to do rather than lose the job over it.

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Before You Build the Dam	Politics of Building the Dam	Construction of the Dam
Controversy over Naming the Dam	Oral Histories	A Last Look at the Hoover Dam