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

They neither named the project nor described its location, but they made the challenge of building it clear enough. “THIS IS NO PICNIC,” the posters warned. “WORKING AND LIVING CONDITIONS ON THIS

ARE AS DIFFICULT AS ANY CONSTRUCTION

JOB EVER DONE IN THE UNITED STATES OR FOREIGN TERRITORY … IF

YOU ARE NOT PREPARED TO WORK UNDER THESE CONDillONS … DO

NOT APPLY.”11 Eager to avoid the draft, hundreds of welders and ironworkers, truck drivers and mechanics, cat skinners and carpenters ignored the warning, and within a month, Bechtel had put together and shipped north a work force of several thousand men. They were soon joined by 2, 500 troops from the Army’s Corps of Engineers and hundreds of Bechtel engineers and technicians. They had their work cut out for them.

There were no roads where they had gone, deep in the Canadian wilderness, a thousand miles from the nearest city of Edmonton; no airports, no railway tracks, no electricity, no creature comforts of any kind. Everything had to be brought in from outside, shipped by barge across Great Slave Lake and up the Mackenzie River-both frozen solid most of the year.

To facilitate the shipment of materials, Bechtel’s crews began hacking out roads and laying down railroad tracks. An airport was built, and soon Bechtel was operating its own airline. By autumn, work had progressed sufficiently that Steve Bechtel, who was flying in on personal inspection tours once a month, had decided to commission a private film on what his men were calling “the greatest project since the Panama Canal.”

H is optimism proved premature. With the onset of winter, work 63

FRIENDS IN HIGH PLACES

He, Steve Bechtel, had only been a good soldier, following his country’s orders.

As for the pipeline and the refinery, they were finally finished in May 1945-three months before the Japanese surrender, and two years behind schedule. They managed, for a time, to pump some oil-at a cost of $150 per barrel, rather than the $5 to $10 Somervell had promised Stimson-but after less than a year the entire operation was abandoned, left to rust in the Canadian wilderness. The cost to the taxpayers had been more than $134 million.

Bechtel, however, had profited handsomely. Not only did he get a percentage of the costs, but, all told, three Bechtelowned companies, W A. Bechtel, the Bechtel Company and BechtelMcCone, received contracts fom the War Department for Canol.

Thanks to projects like Canol, BechtelMcCone was booming. By 1943 it had grown tenfold since the beginning of the war, with revenues exceeding $50 milliona figure that did not include moneys from shipbuilding or Canol. At the direction of the War Department, it was building pipelines and refineries in Mexico, Venezuela and Bahrain, off the coast of Saudi Arabia, and Bechtel had already set up a planning department for more such work when the fighting was over.

In what was to be a pivotal move, he had also acquired a company called Industrial Engineering, which had invented, and held the exclusive patent rights on, a process that could keep pipelines from corroding for fifty years-five times their normal lifetime. W hen the war was over, the process would provide Bechtel with a competitive edge no other pipelining company could match. Until then, there were still other opportunities for BechtelMcCone to exploit. The biggest-and most controversial-was the Army’s Willow Run Aircraft Modification Plant in Alabama.

Bechtel and McCone had wanted to get into the aircraft-building business largely because Henry J. Kaiser was in it