Word: oiling
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...California." The Sahara has captured the imagination of all France. At least a million French families have invested in Saharan oil stocks, and every month thousands of young Frenchmen apply for jobs in the Sahara fields. French newspapers refer to the Sahara as "our California," and the man most responsible for the Sahara agrees. Says France's Minister Delegate Jacques Soustelle: "This desert should come to mean to France what the Far West meant at a certain period to the American states on the Atlantic coast...
...Sahara was a brilliant but unstable French geologist named Conrad Kilian. In 1927, after three harrowing years in the central Sahara-on one expedition he was obliged to remove his own tonsils without anesthetic-Kilian returned to Paris proclaiming that the Sahara was a huge depository of oil and natural gas. Geologists scoffed. "There is no more oil in the Sahara than there are trees in the Atlantic," cracked one. In 1950, worn out by repeated bouts of mental illness and years of rebuffs from French authorities, Kilian hanged himself...
Within months of his death the first official geological research parties set out for the Sahara; within five years the first Sahara oil was discovered at the ocher-red waste, of Edjel...
...climate was all but unbearable. At Hassi Messaoud the first oil drilling teams labored in 120° to 130° temperatures and through sandstorms, often came off an eight-hour shift near collapse. At Edjelé, welders putting together oil storage tanks learned that simply to touch the metal of the tanks meant a bad burn. The combination of Saharan sand and heat wears out mechanical equipment with startling rapidity; at Edjelé the average life of a Dodge truck engine is 7,500 miles...
Using local labor wherever possible, the oil camps have given employment to 20,000 Saharans-and thereby increased sales of radios, motor scooters and bicycles in the neighboring oases by 1,000%. Some Moslem employees have even risen to skilled jobs as truckers or members of oil rig crews, but for the bulk of their skilled labor the oil companies are obliged to look to France. To lure and keep the kind of men they need, the companies rely not on high salaries-top wages for an engineer are $700 a month-but on the pioneer spirit, a generous leave...