Word: aswan
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...carefully woven fabric of international cultural cooperation that had survived many other political and ideological shocks. For its part, Egypt lost the admission charges that U.S. museums had been prepared to donate to a UNESCO project for rescuing the temples of Philae from inundation by the waters of the Aswan High Dam. But the chief losers were U.S. art lovers. Among the masterpieces they had been about to see were many that had never before left Egypt...
...Aswan High Dam, at once Egypt's greatest new economic resource and symbol of national pride, was completed last week after ten years of the most arduous construction work since the pharaohs put up the pyramids. As the dam has risen to 350 ft. above the Nile, so has the reputation of the man who built it: Osman Ahmed Osman, the largest building contractor...
...land the job for the Aswan's first stage, Osman underbid his only competitor by nearly one half. Millions of tons of granite had to be moved in 140° heat, and Osman found his biggest problem to be the Soviet equipment, which had been accepted by Gamal Abdel Nasser as a condition of Russian aid. Soviet power shovels and drills could not cope with the granite, and trucks broke down in the heat. Osman convinced Nasser that only Swedish, British and Japanese equipment would get the $920 million job done on time. His project was completed on schedule...
Abstinence Helps.The laborers whom Osman trained at Aswan have lately been dispersed in half a dozen Arab countries to work on more than $400 million worth of construction. His men are constructing a pair of bridges at Cairo, digging irrigation canals in Iraq, and building a stadium and sewage system in Libya. A 1,000,000-acre land-reclamation project in the salt marshes near Port Said has been held up by Israeli shelling...
Bonuses for Productivity. As an Arab, Osman naturally has an edge over outside bidders. He has also taken to heart modern methods of cost accounting. Because he built Aswan and has never had a major cost overrun, he dominates the field for Egyptian construction contracts, most of them military. He employs no subcontractors, passing on the savings to his employees in productivity bonuses that sometimes amount to two or three times their wages. That way, he always has a reserve of trained labor on call. "I have three basic points in every project," he says. "In order of importance they...