ALASKA: Rush for Riches on the Great Pipeline

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"Economically, right now Alaska is the most exciting place to be in the world." —Neil Bergt, president of Alaska International Industries

"I can't imageine a worseplace in the world to be than Fairbanks this summer." —Lewis J. Gibson, Fairbanks police captain

"Is business good? Wow, fantastic! Just great!" —Gari Andreani, Anchorage stockbroker

"I came to get away from California. I just hope California living doesn't chase me up here." —Jeff Graham, Alaskan trapper and fisherman

Every day the outlanders come streaming in: lean, ambling riggers from Texas and California, husky bulldozer operators, stubble-bearded, pinch-eyed welders from Chicago and Bartlesville, Okla., geologists from "back East," college students out for adventure, and a smattering of whores, highrollers and assorted hangers-on from all over. They come by jets screaming in from Houston and New Orleans, or in mud-covered Winnebago trailers swaying up the Alaska Highway. They come in ancient station wagons, the kids frisking in back, the husband hunched over the wheel and the exhausted wife dozing fitfully in the front seat. They are the latest breed to head for Alaska with the burning desire to strike it rich. Their aim is to work on—or feed off—Alaska's vast oilfields and its great new pipeline. Many will never get jobs, but some who do will make $6,000 or more a month.

Win and Lose. After years of delays, work is finally surging ahead this month on the 798-mile steel boa that will stretch from the wells at Prudhoe Bay to the deep-water port of Valdez (pronounced Val-deez), where block-long tankers will be loaded for the trip to West Coast refineries. Already, 12,000 men and women are on the job building, excavating and servicing, and by midsummer the number will swell to 20,000 as the pipeline contractors drive to make their target date of mid-1977. The spongy, oil-soaked strata nearly two miles beneath the tundra at Prudhoe Bay contains an estimated 9.6 billion barrels of oil, by far the largest deposit in the U.S. Initially, the pipeline will carry 1.2 million bbl. per day, an amount equal to one-fifth of the nation's current oil imports. If other fields in the inhospitable area can be brought into production as expected, the capacity will eventually rise to 2 million bbl. daily.

For Alaska, which has more than twice as much land as Texas but fewer residents (340,000) than Toledo, the pipeline will change practically everything. By 1980 oil royalties and taxes are expected to hit $1 billion a year or twice as much as the state's current budget. Most important, the pipeline will give Alaska a chance, at long last, to escape from its status as an underdeveloped, impecunious ward of the Federal Government. The state's optimists predict that employment will double in five years.

While the oil surge is an economic bonanza, many Alaskans argue that it is also an environmental and social disaster. Says Republican Governor Jay S. Hammond, a former bush guide: "We can't preserve Alaska as we know it, we're going to have to lose some freedoms and qualities of life here." The boom is bringing to the last frontier urban blight, soaring prices, traffic jams, housing shortages and short tempers.