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

There remained a big mopping-up job, the construction of a power plant and the eventual building of a $100 million aqueduct; but Six Companies’ work on Boulder was essentially complete. On September 30, 1935, President Roosevelt, accompanied by Ickes and a retinue of federal officials, reporters and governors and congressmen from the Colorado River Basin states, arrived at Boulder City. At precisely 11:00

A.M. Pacific Time, the president dedicated the dam in a ceremony broadcast live over both major national radio networks. Even Harold Ickes could not but be impressed. “It is a marvel of engineering skill,”

he recorded in his diary. “We were all struck with the wonder and marvel of the thing. “13

42

CHAPTER

4

STEVE

T he building of Boulder

Hoover-changed the Dam-later

face of the

to be renamed

American West

for Herbert

forever. Power

from its mighty turbines electrified cities as far away as Phoenix and Los Angeles, while its water, carried by aqueduct, filled Palm Springs swimming pools and transformed the Imperial Valley from parched desert into one of the richest agricultural areas on the world. Lake Mead, the 115-mile body of water that backed up behind its massive concrete walls, became one of the prime recreational areas of the Southwest. W ithout Boulder, and the rough-hewn men who built it, none of what was to become the Western sun belt would have been possible.

For the partners of Six Companies there were rewards as well. By building Boulder, they had, just as Henry Kaiser had predicted in Cuba, established themselves as world-class builders-and they had made a fortune doing it. After the deduction of taxes and a well-deserved $300,000 bonus for Frank Crowe, they could each count profits, depending on their share, of between $1 million and $2 million.

Flushed with their success, the partners of Six Companies would, in 43

FRIENDS IN HIGH PLACES

years to come, go on and build many New Deal-sponsored projects.

Working together and sometimes independently, they were responsible for construction of the Moffat Tunnel in Colorado, Gray’s Harbor in Washington and the Grand Coulee, Parker and Bonneville Dams.

Indeed, even before Boulder was completed, they had begun a project in some ways yet more daunting than the dam: the more-than-8-milelong Bay Bridge linking Oakland and San Francisco. Built at a cost of $11. 5 million and more than 50 lives-4 7 perished on one day alone, when, en bloc, they plunged through the safety nets and into San Francisco Bay-the Bay Bridge was counted as one of the engineering marvels of its time. Its foundations were the deepest ever laid, its building conditions-including treacherous currents, ever-shifting tides and gale-force winds-among the worst ever encountered. Yet against the odds, against the elements, the Six Companies partners had built it in under five years.** “This is the finest construction outfit on the face of Although the Six Companies partners would occasionally again build together, as they had at Boulder, in the future their partnership was often largely financial. One partner would find a project, then phone up the others, explaining how much capital was required and asking how much they were willing to invest. No lawyers were involved, and no contracts, and in the end, profits were simply divided in proportion