Well, I don't know where to put this thread, so looks like this is the best catagory. Some pix sent to me today, by a friend working, at Prudhoe Bay, as a mechanic. Said it was -40F ,noon time,at Deadhorse, that is the location of the airport. Typical oil patch pictures, and Cat Sidebooms parked and awaiting start of winter work. Notice 3 long sidebooms.
Wow those are long booms how long are they? 594's right?
Cool pics Northart. Send us some more.....:drinkup
Sidebooms Hello Ragerider, Those are custom made booms. Extra long for mounting pipe on top of tall VSM's ( Vertical Support Members ) .:usa I don't know the exact length. Some places the pipe is mounted way up off the ground on VSM's to allow caribou , musk ox , etc, to migrate uninhibited . These are called Game Crossings. Sometimes the pipe is buried a short distance so they can walk over it. All Pipelines are elevated in the Arctic where there is permafrost. Other times due to the terrain, a gully, stream, river, etc. the pipeline is elevated higher. When the Sidebooms can't reach it , other cranes are used. Or a dirt or ice road is built up so the sidebooms can reach it. Far as I know, there are no Hi track sidebooms in Alaska, just the older oval track versions. 583 and 594 model.
Alaska Pipeline Here's some pix of the Alaska Pipeline (48")further south from Prudhoe Bay, still north of Fairbanks. Oil started flowing June of '77. :usa Yukon River crossing, a road crossing, and Livengood . The Zig Zag is for contraction and expansion of the pipe. The fins are heat radiators, to keep the permafrost from melting and settling the pipeline. They been working great all these years. :usa
Awesome picture with great info.Thanks for shareing. Nothing tells a story better then pictures to go with it.Thanks again.:notworthy :usa
They also use longer booms for stringing out pipe, and working with the bending machine.
Longer booms. Hi, Northart. Thanks for the photos. An interesting look at pipeline technology in a hostile environment. In places where I have worked with sidebooms, the longer booms - up to 40 foot - have also been used for unloading pipes from delivery trucks. They pick up a pipe off the truck, then luff out and drop the pipe on the ground on the far side of the truck. Working this way, the pipes are already strung out ready for the welders and pretty much right alongside the trench. Luffing out and lowering at the same time also gets the pipe on the ground quickest. It would appear that not all pipeliners are 'slow'. LOL. Thanks again.
saw a show on thehistory channel about the truckers that haul theloads up to prudhoe bay. seems pretty cool, i'd like to try it
Man, the 2nd set of pics sure looked nicer than the 1st set, eh? A friend of mine worked for Green Construction at Prudhoe for a couple of years back around 89-90. He spent a couple of years in Fairbanks too. He often spoke of the cold and isolation, said three or four years was all most folks could stand. He got out and gravitated to California working for MK, then almost immediately had a massive heart attack -- at age 40. Green wanted me to go to Alaska to work on Moose Jaw Dam I think it was called back in 1975. Fortunately they got a contract for some uranium site work north of Douglas, Wyoming and I went there for six months instead. By the time that job was done, they had everyone they needed for Alaska.
Green Cons't Hi Surfer-joe, That was Moose Creek Dam, really a flood control project to reroute flood waters from the Chena River, around Fairbanks. It has only had flood waters in it once sine 1975 . Works anyway. Green was a good outfit to work for. They were bought out by Hollings, a Austalian outfit, that eventually went belly up. I seen all the equipment later,then go by on the train, being shipped to Russia. The Oil Patch certainly is an interesting place to work, also takes it toll on the people over time.
At the end, Green was bought out by an Aussie outfit called Leighton Contractors Pty Limited. ( http://www.leightoncontractors.com.au/ ) Leighton in turn, is owned by Hochtief of Germany. ( http://www.hochtief.com/hochtief_en/0.jhtml ) I worked one joint-venture called Green-Leighton, a dam in New Jersey. Then worked four more Green jobs before leaving to go to work for Industrial Constructors, a Washington company out of Missoula, Montana. Leighton bought out Associated Pipeline Contractors first, a group that joint-ventured with Green on the Alaska Pipeline. They then did the joint-venture in Jersey with Green, but bought the company out almost before that job was a year old. Leighton sent some Aussi fellas over to run things, but they didn't like Des Moines in the winter time (who does?), so they sold the facilities there and leased space in Dallas. Dallas was closer to the oil patch and Associated's work, and it was far easier to get to Dallas from Aus than Des Moines. Leighton's people didn't know beans about how things worked in the states. In those days in Aus, I'm told, Aussi contractors underbid work, than used strikes and change orders to force the owner to pay more. They also worked vendors against each other for lower costs on materials and supplies, after promising a contract with one or another. American contractors did not work that way, so things go off to a bad start with Green shotgunning several jobs on the east coast. Every one was way underbid. Leighton more or less allowed a simpleton from Associated to run things for a year after taking over with little oversight. He was a real whiz-bang big-shot and could talk a coon down out of a tree. Flew all over in the corporate jet, taking his corporate secretary-bed partner (she was a real stunner!) with him. The pilots had some really good stories about that......... Unfortunately, he didn't know beans about anything else. Anyway, he got the company started mining coal at an old worked out mine in Alabama, then when that played out quickly, he got them to go into a contract mining deal in Kentucky, which was where I rejoined the company after being absent for several years. I went in on a contract maintenance deal in other mines there, which were owned by Reading and Bates, another partner from the Alaska Pipeline days through Associated. (R&B originally owned them) He also got R&B involved in a played out mine in Belva, West Virginia. Anyway, after the coal market blew up in 1985, I worked three of those east coast jobs finishing them up under very tight budgets. All the big money was already gone and on two of the jobs, 50% of the dirt still had to be moved. Oh, I could go on and on about that and some of the other business practices they used. But I don't want to get mad on New Years Eve, eh! Eventually, Leighton started selling off corporate holdings to show a profit. They also started using some far out payment schemes on our vendors. That's when I decided to move on. I wasn't going to lie to my vendors about why it was taking three to six months to get paid. Leighton did good by those of us working as supervisors and managers, but they were losing money big time and people were drifting away as jobs got scarce and business practices got worse. Green worked about three or four more projects after I left, including one mining bauxite in Guyana for Reynolds Aluminum that was a continuation of work that Green had done for years there. They looked at other work overseas too, but so far as I know, nothing ever came of that. They had a coal mining contract in West Virginia under Green Engineering and Mining (GEMCO). The last job they had so far as I know, was a uranium tailings reclamation deal in Rifle, Colorado, which was funny to several of us, as we had left Green jobs in Pennsylvania to go on a uranium tailings project in Grand Junction, Colorado for ICC. We actually went up and bid on some extension of the work in Rifle, but someone else got it. Green did have some maintenance work at Prudhoe, but as I recall, lost the contract for some reason. Somewhere along that time, Green was asked by their bond company to take over a structures contractor that Green was working a project with. The structures outfit was fairly large, but going belly up. A year later, Green was belly up too and there wasn't hardly anything left to sell. The bauxite mine work was sold to a Green vice-president, the mine manager, and one other fella, all former SJ Groves people. I'd worked with them all at Stewartsville Dam and several other projects including my last one at Gray's Landing. PCL of Canada bought what was left of Green, but mainly for the business licenses held by the building contractor Green had taken over from the bonding company. PCL wanted the licenses so they could expand into the states. One of my pals from the oil shale days was Greens corporate equipment manager at the time, and he worked out of Denver selling off the remains of the equipment for a couple of years. I ran into him and looked at some equipment he was selling at the mine in West Virginia. Once the equipment had all been sold, Leighton folded up shop and limped on home down under. They seem to be doing very well there and around the Pacific rim. It was a sorry end to a grand old construction company and I really miss those days. Green had some exceptional people, many of them from Alaska, and there wasn't a thing about moving dirt they didn't know. Some years ago I worked for a contractor out of Columbus, Ohio on a surface coal mine contract in West Virginia (not far from Belva). My boss was one of Green's great corporate equipment managers and at supper one night he related that he had run into Weldon Green recently and of course they had talked about the old days and people and such. He said that Weldon told him that if they had had even the slightest idea that the company would be ruined the way it was, they never would have sold it out. I'm not surprised that some of Green's iron may have went to Russia. Ole Scott sold that stuff wherever he could.
Green Construction Hi Surfer-Joe, "Holdings" is the name I was trying to remember. Green Holdings ..........became PCL 1993 Green Alaska Northland Maintenance Green Leighton the list goes on....... Then there was a Green/Associated during the pipeline. When Green Construction of Des Moines ,Iowa founded by Ralph Green became something else, I don't know. There is a website www.DaveMcClung.com that gives a insight into some of the company history.
I remember when McClung came on board. The company held a big meeting in Pittsburgh where he was introduced to all of us east coast hands as the next gee-whiz leader. It was at dinner right after this meeting that I was notified that something was in the works for several of us long-time Green hands whom had worked together in Wyoming back in the early seventies. This was the potential for going to work for ICC in Colorado. Those concerned met after dinner and discussed the possibilities of staying with Green or leaving. Two of us were not too happy with what had happened management wise on the Gray's Landing job, the others were seeing questionable behavior in Dallas at corporate headquarters. Then there was the disgraceful selling of corporate equipment and materials to certain people in West Virginia, felicitated by one company equipment supervisor and the corporate equipment vice-president at the time. Another interesting story for another time perhaps. I made up my mind that night that leaving before the ship totally sank was the right thing for me to do personally. Looking at McClung's resume reminded me of the many other things the company was into with various companies. All of this stuff and the many other details of the company from it's inception would make a wonderful book that would include information concerning many of America's largest construction projects during what I would call a golden age of heavy civil construction. Many others made the same decision that night to leave I've heard, and sure enough, over the next year or so, many drifted away. Some went to Granite in California, some went with contractors on the east coast or down in Florida. So it goes.
excellent pictures, i enjoy getting emails from steve since he has pictures of the jobs he is at from the south pole to the hot southern usa. maybe i should post a picture of steve when he sunk my FAMOUS BLACK CAT. thansk
Construction History Hello Surfer-Joe, A most fascinating running commentary. Never would learn something like this elsewhere.:usa I like your sentiments on "the golden age of heavy Civil Construction " .
I seen the name PCL Canada and after having worked for these people for most of last year I am here to tell you if you have the opportunity to work for them......DONT; RUN AWAY AS FAST AS YOU CAN.These guys are the most labour unfriendly company I have ever worked for.After they made conditions unbearable they tried to sue us for walking out on them. In fort mac the cant get the labour that they need to do their projects because of their record. Our safety man violated more rules than anybody and even hit a man and still they wouldnt remove him from site.Finally the customer threw him out as well as his replacement.By the way both safety men were shareholders in Pcl.Remember when you are told that there is no price on safety............... these guys made it quite clear that there was. You can take my rambling for what it is worth but if you have another opportunity take that.Icould tell hundreds of horror stories but just ask anyone who has worked for them in the past. Alittle off topic