Word: bechtel
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Overseeing the execution of this mind-stretching enterprise in Jubail are some 1,600 Bechtel architects, civil and mechanical engineers, draftsmen and project managers. Not only must they supervise the performance of 274 prime contractors and more than 500 smaller contractors for everything from kitchen cabinets to multimegawatt electric generators, but they also must manage a multilingual work force of 41,000 laborers from 39 countries...
...their short-sleeved shirts and wide ties, toting clipboards and pocket calculators, the Bechtel brigade seems the very can-do embodiment of American technological know-how. Its members also occasionally demonstrate a flair for improvisation that would do a World War II Navy Seabee proud. Earlier this year, 250 newly assembled Jubail modular housing units stood empty in the desert because some necessary plumbing fittings were missing. Two Bechtel employees promptly boarded a plane, flew 13,000 miles round trip to the U.S. and back and returned carrying several containers of faucets, nuts and washers as excess baggage...
...Bechtel's connection with the Saudis goes back more than 30 years. Stephen Bechtel Sr., son of the founder and father of the current chairman, Stephen Jr., became friends with the late Saudi monarch, King Ibn Saud, during the 1940s when the company worked on an oil refinery in Bahrain. From that early association, a long-lasting-and profitable-Saudi friendship flowered. In 1948 a team of Bechtel engineers mobilized an army of 5,000 local laborers to build the greater part of the 1,068-mile-long Trans-Arabian pipeline. Bechtel's swift execution of the mammoth...
More recently, Bechtel designed the master plan for the King Khalid International Airport in Riyadh, then won the assignment to manage the construction. Now nearing completion, the airport will be finished on time and within the expected budget of $3.2 billion. By comparison, the King Abdulaziz International Airport at Jidda, built by the rival California firm of Parsons Corp., ran far over budget because of design changes before finally being completed last year at a cost of more than $4.5 billion...
...origins of the Jubail project go back to a 1973 meeting at the Bechtel-built Geneva Intercontinental Hotel, between Stephen Sr., then already in his 70s, and Saudi King Faisal, the son of Ibn Saud. Bechtel listened as the King complained that $1 billion worth of natural gas had to be burned every year in Saudi Arabia's oilfields because there was no way the gas could be cheaply transported to locations where it could be used as fuel...