Construction: Monuments Round the World

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For eight weeks in a row, torrential cloudbursts washed across Tanzania. Cattle, goats, chickens and a few humans were swept away in the resulting floods. Roads and bridges crumbled, and vehicles were trapped in a deepening ooze. But through most of the downpour, some 1,200 African tribesmen and Italian workers doggedly continued to lay down six miles of pipeline a day. If they manage to stick to their schedule, "the Great Snake," as the natives call the $45 million project, will be completed in June. Stretching 1,058 miles across mountains and marshes, through thick jungle and dusty scrubland, the line will carry gasoline, kerosene and diesel oil from the port of Dar es Salaam on the Indian Ocean to the copper belt of landlocked Zambia. It will stand as one more monument to the widely varied skills of San Francisco's Bechtel Corp., the largest engineering and construction firm in the world.

Zambia's lengthy lifeline is only one of 89 major Bechtel projects currently under way in 29 states and 34 foreign countries. Bechtel has boosted its busi ness by an impressive average of 20% a year for the past ten years, passed the $1 billion mark in new contracts in 1967, and confidently expects $1.4 billion worth this year.

Ships & Reactors. Those statistics mark a long reach from the spring of 1898, when a young teamster named Warren Bechtel hitched up a couple of mules and went into the "earthmoving" business in Oklahoma's Indian Territory. His knockabout enterprise prospered, and by the time of his death in 1933, "Dad" Bechtel was head of the combine building the Hoover Dam, the biggest construction project of its day. It was his son, Stephen Bechtel, who expanded the business into a worldwide engineering and construction organization that now employs some 8,500 technicians and engineers.

Bechtel's biggest boost came with World War II, when the company built and operated the Calship and Marinship yards on the West Coast and turned out a total of 560 ships for the Allies. During that time, Bechtel was also gaining experience in oil-refinery engineering and pipeline construction, which paid off handsomely in postwar years. Since then, Bechtel engineers have been consistently busy. One of their earlier enterprises: laying a large part of the 1,100-mile trans-Arabian pipeline linking the Persian Gulf with the Mediterranean in 1947-50. One of their more recent tasks: building the transalpine line between Trieste and Ingolstadt in Bavaria, completed last year.

In the late 1950s, Bechtel was invited by the Atomic Energy Commission to construct the first nuclear-power breeder reactor. Since that pioneering work in reactor design and construction, it has participated in 42 commercial nuclear projects, and is working on 20 more.