Friends in High Places: The Bechtel Story : The Most Secret Corporation and How It Engineered the Wo by Laton Mccartney (readict .txt) 📗

all went well, this would be their profit. As soon as the decision was reached, Crowe bolted from the room and rushed to catch the train east to Denver.

He arrived on March 3, checked into the Cosmopolitan Hotel and spent the rest of that day and evening double-checking and triplechecking his numbers. T he next morning, he formally submitted Six Companies’ bid. It totaled $48,890,000-$5 million below the nextlowest bid, $10 million below the highest and only $24,000 above the government’s own estimates. Six Companies had won the right to build the world’s largest dam. Within hours of the announcement of the awarding of the contract, its competitors were predicting it would go broke in the process.

On the face of it, there was much to suggest that they might be right.

Emanating from the deep winter snows of the Rockies in Colorado and Wyoming, then cascading 1, 700 miles to the Gulf of California, the seriously ill. Representing them was Marriner Eccles, then 40 and. a part owner of

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Utah Construction. The son of an Ogden, Utah, banker (it was he who supplied much of the Wattises’ capital in building Boulder), Eccles later became Utah Construction’s chairman. In 1934, he was appointed by Franklin Roosevelt to the board of the Federal Reserve System. Nominated two years later as Fed chairman, he served in that capacity until 1948. Both as a member of the Fed (from which he finally retired in 1958) and as chairman of Utah Construction, Eccles was to have a close personal and professional relationship with the Bechtel family. Utah Construction’s ties with Bechtel continue to the present day in the person of Edmund Littlefield, who succeeded Eccles as Utah chairman and was named a senior Bechtel director in 1982.

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BOULDER

Colorado is one of the world’s mightiest rivers. Over the course of millions of years, it carved out the Grand Canyon. By the time it reaches Black Canyon, another of its creations, 270 miles downstream, it is roiling with red mud and moving at a rate of between 100,000 and 200,000 cubic feet a second. Dr. Elwood Mead, the Department of Reclamation’s chief engineer, after whom the Boulder-created Lake Mead would later be named, likened its power at this juncture to “the force of a railway train.” It was at the Black Canyon site, hard by the Arizona-Nevada border, 30 miles southeast of Las Vegas, that Six Companies proposed to put up its dam.

The Black Canyon site had been chosen for two reasons. One was the comparative shallowness of the river’s bedrock. The other, even more important consideration was the relative narrowness-}, 000 feet at the top, closing to 370 feet at the river’s bottom-of the Canyon’s gorge. Here, Six Companies planned to plug the Colorado with a mammoth concrete ledge, one that would extend 140 feet below the river bed and more than 700 feet above it-about the height of the Empire State Building, and nearly twice the height of any dam ever built.

It was a colossal and, in the opinion of many, insurmountable, undertaking, not merely because of the vast amount of materials that would be required, or the harshness of the desertlike conditions, but because of the power of the river itself. Even in the later summer and fall, when its water was low and sluggish, the Colorado could be capricious and deadly. During the preliminary work on Boulder, drill barges were frequently wrecked by a sudden rush of water down the canyon, and on more than one occasion, it seemed the entire project would be swept away. “The Colorado is a