Word: jubail
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...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...
...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...
Even for a company of Bechtel's resources, experience and depth, Jubail represented a staggering undertaking. When the site for the new city was officially dedicated in October 1977 by King Khalid, who had ascended to the Saudi throne on the death of his half-brother Faisal two years earlier, there was little at Jubail but scrub, sand and the nearby fishing village of Al Jubail seven miles to the south on the Persian Gulf. Within twelve months, enough trailers to house 13,000 workers had been plopped onto the sandscape. A 13,000-ft. runway, capable of receiving...
Because of Jubail's extreme remoteness, nearly all manufactured goods are being shipped to the building sites already partially assembled. In the process, the city is becoming a genuinely modular community, a gigantic expanse of clip-together factories and buildings. The 205-bed Al Huwaylat Hospital, provided by the H.B. Zachry Co. of San Antonio, is arriving at the site virtually in kit form and being assembled room by room, each module having been delivered complete, down to the toilet-paper holders in the bathrooms. Even the hospital's prayer room, which has mosque carpets and lighting directed...
...more visually arresting features of Jubail is the Al Mantekah Al Sakaniyah marina, with smooth white beaches that could grace a Club Méditerranée advertisement. Occupying the four choicest miles of Jubail's 28.8 miles of coastline are three man-made lagoons. Two of them are for swimming (one for families and single women and one for single men). The third is for boating. Eventually, the marina will be landscaped with a winding boardwalk as well as shade gazebos and date palms, giving the area the appearance of a Hawaiian resort...