At 2:38 in the afternoon on July 8th, 1977, pump station 8 exploded. The federal accident report traces it to oil spraying out of a faulty strainer during the startup, where it found a source of ignition. Then the pump building burned. One worker was killed.
Five more were hurt. Alyeska’s log records the oil lost that day at 300 barrels, and the pump building is destroyed. The line was full of oil from Prudhoe almost to Fairbanks. The oil cooled every hour it sat still, and one of the stations built to push it was a burned-out shell.
Pump station 8 wouldn’t run again until March 7th, 1978 at 5:11 in the morning, 8 months later. The line went on without it. This was the last of seven beatings the north had to deal out before a single drop of Alaska’s oil could reach the sea. In 1968, America had found a giant oil field at Prudhoe Bay, and the only way to get that oil out was an 800-mile pipe running hot across ground that turns to mud the moment you warm it.
The steel pipe, 4 feet wide, zigzags across the tundra on stilts, crossing frozen rivers and climbing toward white mountains, with a crawler tractor lowering the next section into place and men in parkas standing beside it, tiny against the snow. On a summer night in 1977, the first oil reached the sea, but Alyeska, the company that built it, counts 32 workers who died getting it there, and 20 days before that night, one of its own pump stations blew up. Two people walk through this story. One is Frank Moolin, the construction boss who promised the whole line would be in the ground by a single date in 1976.
The other is Diane Shanker, a 21-year-old college graduate in Fairbanks who talked her way onto an all-male welding crew and spent her first days crawling on her knees under the pipe. Before the oil moved, the north had to be beaten seven times. First, a road that melted, then a ship stuck in the ice, then the frozen ground itself, then a river nearly half a mile wide, a mountain wall steeper than a church roof, a pass that buries everything in avalanches, and last of all, the day they turned the oil on. The first attempt came before anybody had drawn a pipeline at all, in November 1968.
The oil companies needed drilling rigs, fuel, and camp buildings on the North Slope, and the North Slope had no road. So Alaska’s governor, Walter Hickel, ordered the state highway department to push a winter road north from the end of the gravel near Livengood, about 400 miles, over the Brooks Range to Prudhoe Bay. The crews went out with bulldozers in the dark of an Arctic winter. They did what road builders had always done.
They scraped the ground down to something solid and drove on it. By March of 1969, the road was finished. Trucks could run it. On paper, the state had just opened the Arctic.
Then spring came, and the road disappeared. Not all at once. It sank. What the bulldozers had scraped away was the thin blanket of moss and grass that sits on top of the tundra, and that blanket turned out to be the only thing keeping the ground underneath frozen.
Under it was soil shot through with ice. With the blanket gone, the summer sun went straight into it, the ice melted, and the road became a long trench full of water. People started calling it the Hickel Canal. That’s the paradox the rest of this story runs on.
The tundra doesn’t hold you up because it’s hard. It holds you up because it’s cold, and the cold only stays as long as you don’t touch the surface. The harder you dig for a solid footing, the faster you destroy the footing you already had. The road cost the state about $700,000.
A transportation study written years later counted what it moved that first winter: 8 tons, less than three loads on a cargo plane. A whole winter of bulldozers in the dark, 400 miles of road through the Brooks Range, and the same freight could have gone north on three flights. The first lesson of the north cost $700,000 in one spring, and the next attempt didn’t even try the land. It went by sea.
August 24th, 1969, a tanker called the Manhattan left Chester, Pennsylvania, headed for the top of the world. She was the largest ship flying an American flag at the time, roughly the length of the Empire State Building laid on its side. The Humble Oil Company had fitted her with an ice-breaking bow. The plan was simple to say.
If a tanker could break through the Northwest Passage, the oil could leave Prudhoe Bay by ship, and nobody would have to cross Alaska at all. On board was a 31-year-old from the University of Alaska’s Geophysical Institute named Merritt Helfferich, there to study the ice the ship was breaking. The ice fought back. In McClure Strait, the floes packed so tight the ship had to turn around and find another channel through Prince of Wales Strait.
Sea ice wrecked her speed instruments. An iceberg punched through a section of her hull. She needed Canadian and American icebreakers to keep moving. On September 14th, 1969, the Manhattan reached Prudhoe Bay anyway.
She’d done it. And that’s exactly what killed the idea. She made it back to New York on November 12th. Humble Oil looked at what it had taken to get one ship through once in late summer and decided the cheaper answer was a pipe.
Helfferich remembered it years later with one plain line about the cost of the pipe they chose instead. “800 miles of it,” he said, “was not cheap. ”
The pipe was already on its way. On September 13th, 1969, the day before the Manhattan reached Prudhoe, about a hundred million dollars’ worth of 48-inch steel pipe from Japan was unloaded at the port of Valdez.
It would sit there for years because the next problem was the ground the pipe was supposed to lie in. The oil comes up out of the Prudhoe wells at around 120 degrees, and it has to stay warm because cold crude thickens and stops. So you’ve got a river of hot oil 4 feet wide and you need to carry it 800 miles. Now here’s the ground.
Alyeska’s own fact book says about three-quarters of the route passes over permafrost, ground that has stayed below freezing for at least 2 years, and it isn’t a thin crust. Alyeska puts the depth of the frozen ground along the route as anywhere from a few inches to about 2,230 feet. Some of it is gravel and bedrock, and you can warm that and it barely notices. But a lot of it is fine silt holding 20 to 50 percent visible ice.
The fact book says what happens when that kind thaws. It loses strength. It settles, and there can be so much water in the soil that it flows. Think of setting a hot frying pan down on a frozen pond.
The pan is fine for a moment. Then it starts to sink, and the water it makes is what swallows it. That’s what the first pipeline plan proposed to do, 800 miles long. The original idea was to bury nearly all of it in a ditch the way pipelines were buried everywhere else.
Hot pipe, frozen silt, a ditch. Within a few years, the ground around it would thaw. The pipe would sag, and somewhere in the middle of nowhere, it would bend and break. Engineers drilled soil cores up and down the route and found the ice in them, and the burial plan was finished before a single section went into the ground.
While they redrew it, the lawyers took over. In April of 1970, a federal judge in Washington stopped the project with an injunction. It stayed stopped for more than 3 years until the Senate tied it 49 to 49 in July of 1973 and Vice President Spiro Agnew broke the tie and President Nixon signed the authorization that November, weeks into the Arab oil embargo. All that time, the Japanese pipe sat in Valdez in the rain.
And there was a lot more of it coming. Over the whole job, Alyeska counts more than 100,000 lengths of pipe and about 550,000 tons of steel shipped from Japan. Those years weren’t empty on the ground, though. Survey crews and camp crews were already living along the route, and the north was showing them what winter meant up there.
January 23rd, 1971. At a pipeline camp called Prospect Creek, just north of the Arctic Circle and about 160 miles north of Fairbanks, the weather observer read his thermometer and wrote down 80 degrees below zero. The warmest it got that whole day was 64 below. It’s still the coldest temperature ever officially recorded in the United States, and it was recorded by the people getting ready to build this pipe.
That’s the other half of the problem. The ground can’t be warmed, and the air can kill you. At 80 below, exposed skin freezes in minutes. Steel gets brittle.
Diesel turns to jelly in the fuel lines unless it’s treated. Alyeska lists the temperature range along the route as 80 below to 95 above, and every machine and every weld on the line would have to live through both ends of that. Other people walked the route in those years, too, and they weren’t looking for oil. Before the pipe could go in, Alyeska paid the University of Alaska and Alaska Methodist University to survey the entire line for archaeology.
Crews walked the corridor from the Arctic Ocean to the sea. The survey cost about 2. 2 million dollars and ended in the excavation of about 330 sites, places where people had camped and hunted along that same ground long before anyone had heard of Prudhoe Bay. The oil itself had been a long time coming.
Alyeska’s fact book says exploratory drilling on the North Slope went on for more than 20 years. Well after well came up dry and company after company gave up and left before the discovery well at Prudhoe was drilled in 1967 and a second well the next year proved how big the field really was. After 20 years of dry holes, nobody was going to leave that oil in the ground because of a little mud. The question was only how.
Meanwhile, the engineers went back to the frying pan on the pond. If you can’t put a hot pipe in the frozen silt, the only other choice is to keep it off the silt entirely. So in the stretches where the ground was full of ice, they decided to lift the pipe into the air and set it on legs. Gravel and bedrock could still take a buried pipe.
The ice-rich ground would get stilts. When the final count was done, about 420 miles of the line would run above ground. About 376 miles would be buried the ordinary way, and about 4 miles would be buried in a special way. But stilts have their own problem, and it’s sneaky.
A steel leg driven into frozen ground is a straight path for heat. Summer sun warms the steel, the steel warms the ground around it, and the ice around the leg starts to melt. Then winter comes, the top layer of soil freezes again and expands, and it grips the leg and pushes it upward. Alyeska calls that frost jacking.
Do that every year, and a leg works its way up out of the ground like a fence post in a farmer’s field. Anyone who has set posts in cold country knows the sight. A fence line where every spring the posts sit a little higher than they did the fall before. Now imagine that fence post is holding up a pipe full of hot oil.
If one leg rises and the next one doesn’t, the pipe between them bends. Do that across hundreds of miles for decades, and the pipe tears itself apart. So the legs had to do something nobody had asked a fence post to do before. They had to keep the ground cold by themselves.
The answer was a tube inside the leg. Two of them, actually, each about 2 inches wide on each leg that needed it, each sealed and charged with ammonia under pressure, running from deep in the ground up to a set of aluminum fins at the top of the leg. Here’s how it works, and it sounds like it shouldn’t. In winter, the ground down where the tube ends is warmer than the Arctic air up top.
The ammonia at the bottom picks up that heat and boils. The vapor rises to the fins. The fins are sitting in air at 40 below, so the vapor gives up the heat and turns back to liquid, and the liquid runs back down the tube to do it again. All winter long, every leg pulls heat out of the ground and throws it into the sky.
And in summer, when the air is warmer than the ground, it stops. The liquid sits at the bottom. Heat can’t run back down. It’s the same thing you see on a cold kitchen window when a pot is boiling on the stove.
The steam carries the heat to the glass, gives it up, and runs down as water. Only here the window is the Arctic sky and the pot is the frozen ground. The ground under each leg gets colder every winter than it would ever be on its own, and the warm months can’t undo it. That was the design.
Whether 800 miles of it could actually be put in by people working at 60 below was a different question, and nobody had answered it yet. So when the work finally started, the engineers had a design, a permit, and a country waiting on its gas lines. What they didn’t have was any way to get a single truck to the north end of the line. The answer had to be a road, and after the Hickel Canal everybody knew what a road in the Arctic could turn into.
April 29th, 1974, crews started the haul road from the Yukon River north to Prudhoe Bay, 358 miles. They had until the end of the summer. The first piece already existed. A road from Livengood up to the Yukon had been pushed through in the winter of 1969, the last thing built in the Hickel years.
Everything north of the river was new, and everyone on that job knew the question hanging over it. Would this road sink too? This time they did the opposite of what the bulldozers did in 68. They didn’t scrape the tundra.
They covered it. The road was built up on a thick pad of gravel laid on top of the living moss. So the gravel became a new blanket, and the frozen ground underneath never felt the sun. The fact book puts the gravel for the haul road at 32 million cubic yards.
Every one of those yards had to be dug out of a gravel pit, loaded, hauled, and spread across country that had no road to haul it on, which is why so much of the first equipment and fuel came in by air on what the construction records count as about 170,000 flights. Alyeska puts the work on the road at 3 million hours in the long summer light. At the peak of that summer, about 3,400 people were working on the road. The crews built 20 permanent bridges.
The road would later carry the name of James Dalton, an Alaska-born mining engineer who had run construction of the radar stations of the distant early warning line across the Arctic. On September 29th, 1974, 154 days after they started, the haul road was finished. It was the first highway in America to cross the Arctic Circle. But a road that starts at the Yukon River is only useful if you can get across the Yukon River.
At the crossing, the Yukon is a big brown river moving fast, and the bridge planned for it would run 2,295 feet. Until it was done, everything for the north had to cross on a ferry in summer or on a road of ice in winter. Work on it had started in May of 1974. To set a bridge pier in a river like that, you build a cofferdam.
Think of pressing a bottomless steel can down into the riverbed and pumping the water out so men can work dry on the bottom of the river with the current running past the walls. The cofferdams for the Yukon piers were about 54 feet wide and 37 feet deep. In August of 1974, the cofferdam at Pier 4 failed at its base while crews were working to set the pier. They pulled the whole thing out of the river and started over.
The ground under Pier 4 was the trouble. One corner of it was unstable, so the engineers redesigned the footing and built a larger cofferdam to reach it. Through the winter, the freight crossed the Yukon the old way on a road of ice laid across the frozen river. The bridge they finally finished has a strange habit worth knowing about.
It changes length with the seasons. Between the cold of winter and the warmth of summer, the steel deck grows and shrinks by almost 2 feet. Hold on to that number, because the pipe has the same problem. 800 miles long, but the pipe still wasn’t in the ground anywhere.
March 27th, 1975. At the Tonsina River in the mountains north of Valdez, crews lowered the first stretch of the pipeline into the ground under the river. 1,900 feet of pipe carried by 12 side-boom tractors moving together, each one a crawler with a crane arm hanging off its side, lifting the pipe like pallbearers. That date is not a coincidence.
11 years earlier to the day, on March 27th, 1964, the Good Friday earthquake shook Alaska, and an underwater landslide carried the Valdez waterfront into the sea. 32 people died there. The whole town was moved about 4 miles to safer ground. So the pipeline was built to end in a town that had already been destroyed once by moving ground, and the line itself had to cross that kind of ground, too.
North of the Alaska Range, the route crosses the Denali Fault, a crack in the earth where one side can lurch sideways past the other. You can’t stop a fault from moving. So at the crossing, the engineers laid the pipe on long steel beams on supports that would let it slide. Alyeska’s design figure was 20 feet sideways and 5 feet up or down without the pipe breaking.
Whether that number was right, nobody would know until the earth tested it. The test would come a long time after the last weld. By the summer of 1975, the pipeline had turned into dozens of jobs at once, spread over 800 miles, and the people doing them came from everywhere. Valdez felt it first.
In June of 1975, Time magazine reported that the town’s population had tripled to 3,600 in 17 months. A two-bedroom apartment that had rented for $286 a month was going for 1,600. Grocery shelves ran empty. Kids sat in makeshift classrooms.
Fairbanks was worse because Fairbanks was the gate. Police officers there were earning $1,620 a month, and the pipeline was paying security guards $1,000 a week. So the officers quit and went to the pipeline. Time counted two state troopers left in the area out of 17 the state had authorized.
The same article found the cost of it in Fairbanks. A tent maker there had sold $45,000 worth of tents in 1972 and 240,000 the year before the article ran, because people coming for the pipeline had nowhere else to sleep. The local rescue mission had 15 or 20 people sleeping on its floors most nights, and a crisis line got a call from a hungry 10-year-old whose mother and father had both gone off to work on the pipeline. The pay was real.
The same article listed what a journeyman welder grossed in an 184-hour week: $1,505. A camp handyman made $940 for 84 hours. That’s 12 hours a day, 7 days a week, and people lined up for it. Over a year, a typical worker on the line could make about $57,000, at a time when a member of Congress was paid $42,500.
The biggest union on the job, Teamsters Local 959, the union of the truck drivers and camp workers, grew past 23,000 members. A worker on the line could out-earn a congressman. That tells you how badly the country wanted this oil and how few people were willing to go up there and get it. In October of 1975, the work peaked.
Alyeska’s own count says 28,072 people were on the job that month. They lived in 29 camps strung along the route, the biggest at Isabel Pass with 1,652 beds, the smallest at Sourdough with 112. Think about what Isabel Pass camp was: 1,652 beds in a mountain pass, more than 3,000 feet up in the Alaska Range. Before the boom, Valdez didn’t have that many people, and the whole camp was there for one reason, to be gone once the pipe went through.
Somewhere between 5 and 10 percent of the workers were women. Over the whole project, about 70,000 people worked on the line. And at the head of all of it was Frank Moolin, the senior project manager. The histories of the job all describe the same thing about him.
He drove people. The project had a staggering list of contractors, unions, and camps, and Moolin’s job was to make all of it move in the short window when the ground and the weather allowed. That window decided everything. In the far north, you can’t lay pipe whenever you want.
Some rivers can only be crossed when they’re frozen. The schedule was drawn around the ground. So here’s what the work looked like on the stretches where the pipe went up on legs. First, drill holes into frozen ground.
Alyeska’s fact book says the legs went 15 to 70 feet deep, depending on what the soil was, and stood about 60 feet apart along most of the line. Each hole had to be bored into soil that could be up to half ice and as hard as concrete in winter. Then set the leg, and on the legs that needed them, the two ammonia tubes with their aluminum fins on top. Then a crossbeam between each pair of legs, and on the crossbeam, a shoe for the pipe to rest in.
And here’s the clever part. The shoe wasn’t bolted down. The pipe could slide in it. Remember the Yukon Bridge growing and shrinking by 2 feet.
Now picture a steel pipe 800 miles long that might sit empty at 50 below one month and carry oil at well over 100 degrees the next. Steel that long with a temperature swing like that would try to grow by a distance you’d measure in miles across the whole line. If you bolted it in a straight line, it would tear itself off its supports. So they didn’t lay it straight.
On the elevated stretches, the pipe zigzags. Seen from the air, it looks like someone drew it with an unsteady hand. But every bend is a place where the pipe can flex. When it heats up and grows, the zigzags get a little sharper and the pipe slides sideways in its shoes.
When it cools, they relax. It’s the same reason a garden hose laid out in loose curves can be pulled a little longer without kinking, and a hose stretched tight can’t. 78,000 legs went in that way, and for every leg, somebody had to drill a hole, set a pipe, weld a crossbeam, and fit a shoe in places where the nearest town might be 200 miles away. Then there was the water.
Alyeska’s fact book counts 34 major river and stream crossings on the route, and nearly 500 smaller ones. Every one of them was a place where the pipe had to go under or over moving water. And moving water in Alaska does not stay where you left it. Rivers up there braid and wander.
A channel that runs along one bank this summer can be cutting across the other bank next spring when the ice breaks up and comes down in slabs the size of houses. A pipe buried a few feet under a riverbed can find itself lying in the open a year later with the current and the ice working on it. So the river crossings went deep, and the pipe in them was wrapped in concrete. The concrete wasn’t for strength.
It was weight. An empty steel pipe 4 feet wide is mostly air, and in a river, air floats. The concrete jacket was there to hold the pipe down on the bottom. That works as long as everything goes to plan.
Keep that in mind, because on one river it didn’t. Then there were the animals. The route crossed the ranges of two caribou herds, the Central Arctic herd on the North Slope and the Nelchina herd in the Copper River country. And nobody knew for sure whether a herd would walk under a pipe on stilts or turn back from it.
So the elevated line was raised high enough in places for animals to pass beneath, and in other places the pipe dropped into the ground for a short stretch just so they could walk over it. Alyeska counts about 579 of these animal crossings along the main line, but some of those crossings were exactly where the ground was full of ice. In a few places, the engineers needed the pipe underground for a highway or for animals on ground that could not take a warm pipe. So they did something that sounds backward.
They buried the pipe in insulation and then they refrigerated the ditch. At those spots, refrigeration plants run chilled brine through loops of 6-inch pipe laid in the ground beside the oil line like the cooling coils in the back of a freezer. Two of the animal crossings north of Valdez are built that way. So is the crossing under the Glenn Highway at Glennallen.
Think about that for a second. To carry hot oil past a herd of caribou, they built a refrigerator in the ground and put the oil pipe inside it. All of this, the legs and the zigzags and the frozen ditches, had to be finished on a deadline the whole country was watching. October of 1975 had two dates in it that Alyeska still lists.
The first came early in the month. The Yukon River Bridge, the one whose cofferdam had failed the summer before, was finished. On October 10th, there was a ceremony on it, and the haul road was now tied to the rest of Alaska across the biggest river in the state. Alyeska’s president during the construction was Edward Patton, and the bridge carries his name today.
That bridge took 17 months from the first work in the river to the ceremony, and one of those months was spent watching a cofferdam fail and starting again. For the people building the rest of the line, it meant something simple. For the first time, a pipeline truck could drive from Fairbanks to the Arctic Ocean without waiting for the river to freeze. The second came on October 26th.
That day Alyeska announced the project was half done. Half done in October with winter arriving. And the half that was left was the hard half. The easy flat ground near the camps had gone in first.
What remained were the mountain passes, the canyons, and the long frozen miles in the Brooks Range. The plan for that second half was built around a single idea. One of the phrases you’ll find in the histories of the job is that you start this pipeline once and it stays on forever. The oil would go in, the pipe would fill, and from that day on it would never be allowed to stop, because hot oil that stops in an Arctic pipe starts to cool, and cold crude turns thick.
Hold on to that, too, because the day the oil was turned on, it would stop more than once. The legs were only the bed. The pipe itself was still coming, and it came in pieces. Every section of pipe that left Japan was 40 or 60 feet long, more than 100,000 of them.
In Fairbanks, welders joined pairs of them into double joints, 42,000 of those, so the trucks could haul longer pieces up the line. Out in the field, crews welded those pieces end to end. Alyeska counts 66,000 of those field welds. The welders were mostly members of Pipeliners Local 798 out of Tulsa, Oklahoma, and the pipe was their whole world.
One line about them in the construction histories goes, “Take your typical 798 pipeline welder, feed him a few drinks, and he’ll probably tell you he’s God’s greatest gift to welding. ”
The steel they were welding wasn’t all the same, either. For about 466 miles, the pipe wall was just under half an inch thick, and for the other 334 miles, it was thicker, a little over half an inch, where the line needed more strength. Every weld was supposed to be x-rayed.
A film was shot through the joint. The film was read, and a weld with a flaw got cut out and done over. That’s how you know a pipe will hold hot oil under pressure for decades. That summer, the x-rays started lying.
The company doing the x-ray work was a subcontractor called Ketchbaw Industries. One of its employees, a Fairbanks man named Peter Kelly, later testified to Congress about what he’d seen. He said he’d personally falsified about 30 x-rays and had watched others doing it before and behind him. Films were falsified to show good joints.
According to Kelly, it went on for about a month and a half in the summer of 1975 over more than 70 miles of the pipeline. He gave the reason in one plain sentence. It was to keep Ketchbaw moving down the pipeline and keeping up with its contract. That’s the schedule again.
The same window that drove everything else had just driven somebody to fake the one test that mattered most. In September of 1975, a former Ketchbaw employee went to court over it, and the story was out. Alyeska fired its x-ray contractor. Congress called hearings, and everyone suddenly wanted to know the same thing.
How many of the welds already in the ground were good? Alyeska went back to a 150-mile stretch and checked it and found that 8 percent of the manual welds there had defects. The federal government ordered an independent review of the records for every weld done that year, 30,800 of them. Of those, 3,955 came back questionable.
That’s roughly one weld in eight from that whole year. Every one of them a place where hot crude was supposed to be held in by a joint nobody could vouch for. Now think about where those welds were. A lot of them weren’t up on legs where you could reach them.
They were in ditches, under river crossings, already covered. In the stretch Alyeska rechecked first, there were 3,748 welds, and about two-thirds of them were already buried under the ground. Alyeska went back for every one of them. They went through the x-ray records weld by weld.
Where a film was missing or doubtful, and the weld was underground, the weld had to be checked again, and that meant reaching it. Where the check failed, it meant cutting out the joint and doing it over. By September of 1976, more than 3,000 of the questionable welds had been redone or cleared as safe. The repairs cost about $55 million.
A month and a half of faked film had turned into a year of going backward. And that year, 1976, was supposed to be the year the line got finished. Frank Moolin had set the goal himself. He told the press that all of the line would be installed, insulated, and hydro-tested by November 1st.
Then he admitted the problem with that promise in a sentence the construction history still quotes. “In some areas,” he said, “we did eat our cake last year. ” He meant the easy ground was gone. Everything left was the kind of country that had stopped the Hickel road and turned back the Manhattan, and now there was a date on it.
That was the summer Diane Shanker came onto the line. She was 21, just out of Reed College, living in Fairbanks with no construction experience at all. She’d heard a rumor that the welders union, the same Local 798, was being forced to hire women. So she went to the union office and talked the office manager into sending her out.
They sent her to an all-male welding crew, mostly men from the south, as a welder’s helper. Her first job was to crawl on her hands and knees under the pipe and pick up the stubs of spent welding rod the welders dropped. When she was moved up to grinding the welds, her crew threatened to quit, saying it was too dangerous for a woman. One day the crew agreed not to speak to her at all.
That lasted about 4 hours. Another time, a man on the crew threw her into the water after she’d told them she couldn’t swim. He was gone from the camp right away. She stayed.
Years later, she told an interviewer that the work wasn’t the hard part. She said she’d carried more weight on a tray waiting tables than she ever had to carry on that job. When she’d worked enough hours to earn her union card, she was turned down and told she’d be fired on the spot if she kept pushing. She later testified in a federal discrimination case against the union.
She’s retired now, living in Anchorage. The welds on this pipe were ground smooth, in part, by a 21-year-old who’d been told she’d never get her card. Up at the north end of the line, the work never stopped for winter, because on the North Slope, winter is when the ground is at its best. Alyeska’s fact book describes that country plainly.
A flat plain with no trees running from the foothills of the Brooks Range to the Arctic Ocean. For 56 days in winter, the sun never rises. Temperatures drop to 60 below, and with the wind, the cold can feel like 135 below. In the middle of the day, there’s a kind of long twilight, and the fact book says it’s enough light to drive without headlights.
So picture a welding crew out there at noon in December in that blue half-light working inside a little shelter pulled over the joint to keep the wind off the arc. Hot metal at 60 below. Every weld has to cool slowly and evenly, or the cold cracks it. Then summer comes, and that same plain turns into a sponge.
The top layer thaws, the water can’t drain down through the frozen ground underneath, and the whole slope becomes a field of ponds and mud that a boot sinks into. Heavy machines tear it up. That’s why the gravel road and the gravel work pad mattered so much. Alyeska measures the work pad along the line as 790 miles long.
A gravel shelf running almost the whole way from Prudhoe to Valdez, so the machines would never have to touch the tundra. 790 miles of gravel laid down just to keep from touching the ground. That’s how seriously they took what happened to the Hickel Road. And on that same North Slope, in the summer of 1976, one of those welded sections broke loose.
June of 1976, on the Sagavanirktok River, the Sag, as everybody called it. A stretch of concrete-coated pipe 1,700 feet long had been laid in a trench under the river. Remember what the concrete was for. Weight, to hold the pipe on the bottom.
It came up anyway. 1,700 feet of pipe floated to the surface of the river. That’s about a third of a mile of steel and concrete lying on top of the water where it had been buried. And the crews had a clock on them.
The environmental rules gave them a 24-hour window to work in that river. They got the pipe back down and fixed it in 4 hours. 4 hours for a pipe the length of five football fields that had just floated out of a river in the Arctic. But the Sag was flat country.
The mountains were still waiting, and the mountains had their own clocks. At the south end, the oil needed somewhere to go, and in 1976, the marine terminal at Valdez was rising across the bay from the new town. It would cost about 1. 4 billion dollars by itself, close to a fifth of the whole project.
Tankers would tie up there to take on the oil. One of the loading berths was built as a floating platform with 13 buoyancy chambers, and it weighed 6 and a half million pounds. They built it to float because the ground under Valdez had already shown, in 1964, what it could do to anything set on it. In between, the hardest country on the whole route was still in the way.
Start with Keystone Canyon, just outside Valdez, where the pipe climbs out of the coast through a narrow gorge with rock walls on either side. The winter before, more than 300 inches of snow fell there. That’s 25 feet. Parts of the work in Keystone were so steep that pipe had to be flown in by helicopter.
Out on the line, the men who had to make it work were in the cabs. One description of what a sideboom operator needed said he must be able to sit on a sideboom at 40 below and not freeze up. The sideboom tractors were the backbone of the job. A crawler with a crane arm on its side, lifting a section of pipe that weighs tons, while three or four others lift the same section a few dozen feet down the line, all of them inching forward together over ice.
Then Thompson Pass, the last mountain wall before the sea. Alyeska’s fact book gives the steepest grade on the whole route there, 145 percent. Fifty-five degrees. Say that out loud, and it sounds like a mistake.
A grade is how far you climb for every 100 feet you go forward. A 100 percent grade means you climb 100 feet for every 100 feet, which is a 45-degree slope, the angle of a steep roof. 145 percent means you climb 145 feet for every 100 you move forward. The ground is closer to a wall than a hillside, and the pipe had to go straight up it, 4 feet wide, in sections that weighed tons, with every weld on it x-rayed, and this time the films were going to be real.
You can’t drive a sideboom up a slope like that. And at the north end, in the Brooks Range, there was Atigun Pass, the highest point on the line at 4,739 feet. Atigun was the opposite problem from the rivers. The pass was full of permafrost and glacial soil, so the pipe should have gone up on legs.
But Atigun is avalanche country. A pipe on legs in that pass would be swept away by the first big slide. So they put it on the ground, in a way only this job would think of. They built a concrete box about 6,000 feet long and lined it with 21 inches of Styrofoam.
The hot pipe went inside the box. The insulation kept its heat from the frozen ground, and the concrete kept the mountain off the pipe. And the box had to be closed before the snow. In Atigun, that meant October.
If the snow came first, the season was gone, and the pass would sit open all winter. They closed it in time, which sounds like a small sentence until you remember that if they hadn’t, a half-finished trench full of pipe would have sat open at the top of the Brooks Range all winter, under avalanches, while every other part of the line waited on it. November 1st came, Moolin’s date. The line was not done.
The last section of pipe went in on December 6th, 1976, near Thompson Pass on that same mountain wall. At least 5 weeks late, and with the pipe finally in the ground from end to end, the people who had built it faced the only question that had ever mattered. Would the ground hold once the oil was hot inside it? The final weld was made on May 31st, 1977, near pump station 3.
And 3 weeks later, they found out. June 20th, 1977, pump station 1 at Prudhoe Bay. At 10:26 in the morning, Alaska time, the oil went into the pipe. It didn’t go in alone.
Ahead of it, the crews pushed a cleaning plug through the line, and ahead of the oil, they sent pressurized nitrogen gas so that no water left from the testing would sit in front of the crude and freeze. Behind the nitrogen came the oil itself. And the oil at the front was barely moving. It was pushing into 800 miles of cold, empty steel, and the steel pulled the heat out of it.
One account of the startup says the oil at first had a viscosity very similar to asphalt. There’s a number in Alyeska’s fact book that explains why this took so long. Before a single barrel could come out at Valdez, the pipe had to be full from end to end. The fact book calls that the line fill and puts it at a little over 9 million barrels.
9 million barrels of oil poured into the pipe just to fill it before anyone saw a drop at the other end. So the front of the oil crawled south. Prudhoe to Valdez would take 31 days. That’s a little over a mile an hour, about the pace of a slow walk.
Someone strolling beside the front of that oil, if anyone could have walked that country, would have kept up with it most of the way. Alyeska still keeps the log of that trip, station by station, down to the minute, and it reads like a race against a clock nobody could see. The oil front reached pump station 3 on June 24th at 4 minutes to 1 in the afternoon. Pump station 4 the next morning at 10 minutes to 8.
It was climbing toward the Brooks Range now, toward Atigun, and every mile it went, it was filling cold steel that had sat empty through the winter. Pump station 5, June 28th at 23 minutes past 6 in the morning. Pump station 6, July 1st at 6:30 in the evening. Remember what the plan said.
You start this pipeline once and it stays on forever. Three days later, it stopped. July 4th, 1977. Near milepost 489, just north of pump station 8, crews found nitrogen leaking out of the line ahead of the oil front.
The flow was shut down. When they opened the pipe up, they found out why, and it’s the coldest detail in this whole story. The nitrogen being pushed ahead of the oil was supercooled. It had cracked the steel.
A section of pipe and an elbow fitting had split from the cold of the gas that was supposed to protect them. They cut it out and put in new pipe. The pipe that was built to survive the Arctic had been cracked from the inside by cold the builders sent through it themselves. They got it moving again.
At 24 minutes past 9 on the night of July 7th, the oil front reached pump station 8. Pump station 8 sits about 17 miles southeast of Fairbanks. Its job was to push the oil on toward the Alaska Range. The next day, the crews there were bringing it online for the first time.
At 2:38 in the afternoon on July 8th, pump station 8 exploded. The line went on without it. On July 19th, a piece of heavy equipment hit the line at a check valve, and 1,800 barrels of oil spilled. Another repair, another start.
Then the front started moving station to station again. Pump station 9, July 20th, at 23 minutes to 11 in the morning. Pump station 10, July 22nd, at quarter to 5 in the morning. Pump station 12, the last one before the sea, July 26th, at 12 minutes to 4 in the morning.
By then, Alyeska counted 32 workers who had died building this pipeline. The cost had gone from the 900 million dollars the oil companies had talked about in 1969 to about 8 billion. Every one of those numbers was on the line that summer, inside one slow column of oil working its way south through the mountains. It crossed the Denali Fault on its sliding beams.
It climbed through Isabel Pass at 3,420 feet and went down the Copper River country past Glennallen through the refrigerated crossing under the highway and on toward the coast. It went over Thompson Pass down the slope that was steeper than a roof and into Keystone Canyon. July 28th, 1977. At the marine terminal in Valdez, the town that had been moved after the earthquake, the oil came out of the end of the pipe at 2 minutes past 11 at night.
It came out at 45 degrees. The pipe had pulled most of its heat away on the long cold trip. Only over the weeks that followed, as more warm oil kept coming behind it, did the steel and the oil settle into balance. And all along the 800 miles behind it, the ground under the stilts was still frozen.
The legs were standing where they’d been set. The zigzags were sliding in their shoes just as they’d been drawn. Nothing had sunk. The hot pipe had crossed the ground that turns to mud, and the ground had held because the pipe had never really touched it.
Four days after the oil arrived, on August 1st, the tanker Arco Juno sailed out of Valdez with the first load of North Slope crude, and the pipeline has been running ever since. At its peak, it was built to carry a little over 2 million barrels a day. Today, it carries roughly 470,000. Of the 12 pump stations in the original design, one was never built, and only four still pump oil.
You can drive almost the whole thing. Start in Fairbanks and go north on the Elliott Highway to Livengood. That’s where the gravel ended in 1968 and where the Hickel Road crews turned off into the tundra. From there, the Dalton Highway takes over.
It’s the haul road, the one built in 154 days, and the pipe runs right beside it for most of the way. Fifty-seven miles up, you reach the Yukon River and drive across the Patton Bridge. Look for the pipe hanging alongside the deck. In winter, that whole bridge is almost 2 feet shorter than it is in July.
Keep going north and you cross the Arctic Circle. Not far past it, near where Prospect Creek meets the Jim River, is the site of the camp where somebody wrote down 80 below on a January day in 1971. There’s not much left there now. That number is still the record.
Then the Brooks Range. Somewhere along this stretch, the trees thin out, and the pipe, up on its legs beside the road, starts to look exactly the way it looks from the air, a silver line in a zigzag, rising and falling over every swell of ground. Then the climb up Atigun Pass to 4,739 feet, and the pipe vanishes at the top. It’s down there under the road, cut in its concrete box, with its 21 inches of foam keeping the mountain off it the way it was built to in the fall of 1976.
That box is also where the ground got its one real answer back. In June of 1979, 2 years after the oil arrived, the buried pipe at Atigun Pass settled, and Alyeska’s log records 1,500 barrels leaked there. Five days later, the same thing happened far to the south near milepost 734, and 4,000 barrels came out. In both places, the pipe was underground.
The legs up in the air had held. Where the pipe was buried, the ground had found it. North of the pass, the trees stop, and the pipe runs out across the open North Slope on its legs toward Prudhoe Bay. In winter, you’ll see the steel bending away to the horizon in its long zigzag with the aluminum fins on top of most of the legs standing up against the sky.
Now go south instead toward the sea. Down the Richardson Highway, the pipe crosses the Alaska Range through Isabel Pass, where the biggest camp on the line once stood. Just north of it, on November 3rd, 2002, the Denali Fault did what the engineers had planned for. A magnitude 7.
9 earthquake, the largest on the Denali Fault since at least 1912, moved the ground along the fault by about 18 feet sideways and 2 and a half feet up. The pipe was built to take 20 feet and 5. It slid on its beams. Alyeska replaced some damaged supports afterward, and the pipe never broke.
The engineers who drew that crossing had guessed right a quarter of a century before the ground tested them. Past Glennallen, you’re on the stretch where the pipe runs underground through refrigerated ground. Then the Tonsina River, where the first 1,900 feet went in on March 27th, 1975. Then Thompson Pass at 2,812 feet, where the last section of the line went in that December on a slope you’d need your hands to climb.
Then down through Keystone Canyon between the rock walls, where the snow fell 25 feet deep the winter they built it. And then Valdez, the new town 4 miles from the old one, with the terminal across the water where the oil came out at 2 minutes past 11 on a July night. Tankers still tie up at the berths there. On a clear day, you can look past them down Valdez Arm toward Prince William Sound.
The water every load of North Slope oil has gone out through since that summer. Now go back to those legs on the North Slope one more time. On any night in January, when it’s 40 below up there, inside each of those legs, the ammonia is boiling up out of the ground and giving its heat to the sky, pulling the cold down into the earth exactly the way it did the first winter after the oil arrived. Nobody turns them on in the fall.
Every winter since 1977, 61,000 of those legs have been freezing the ground under a river of hot oil, so that the ground never finds out the oil is there.
