Word: ported
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...Lose. After years of delays, work is finally surging ahead this month on the 798-mile steel boa that will stretch from the wells at Prudhoe Bay to the deep-water port of Valdez (pronounced Val-deez), where block-long tankers will be loaded for the trip to West Coast refineries. Already, 12,000 men and women are on the job building, excavating and servicing, and by midsummer the number will swell to 20,000 as the pipeline contractors drive to make their target date of mid-1977. The spongy, oil-soaked strata nearly two miles beneath the tundra...
...countries were still surging through the pipeline across the Pacific. The Defense and State Departments acted immediately to turn off the flow: they rescinded letters of credit to recipients, canceled orders to suppliers, and cabled ships at sea to "frustrate" their cargoes (that is, dump them) at the nearest port. Result: military aid was routed directly to U.S. bases but non-military goods are piling up in warehouses all over Asia, especially in Singapore, Bangkok, Hong Kong and Manila...
...Port Gentil is also the home of what they told me was the "largest plywood factory in the world," the Compagnie Forestiere du Gabon. It's about the size of five football fields, just in floorspace. It has three lakes in which you can hardly see the water, there are so many logs and it has a dozen hangars where the finished product is stored. It takes about fifteen minutes for a twenty-foot log to be stripped of its bark, clamped into the peeling machine, and transformed into a few hundred feet of "veneer," one-quarter to one-eighth...
...Port Gentil, Gabon--The flags were out in Port Gentil, too. The President of Gabon, Albert Bongo, and the President of neighboring Cameroun, el-Amidji, were in town to demonstrate Central African unity and boost their egos. It turned out later that the welcome signs--"Vive la cooperacion Africaine"--and the clean streets weren't enough. The presidents were pissed because the clapping hadn't been enthusiastic enough, and Bongo made vague threats about funds to the local authorities...
...Gabonese who changed my money at the bank (Union Monetaire du Afrique Centrale--a relic of the French colonial administration) laughed as told me the story. It seems that nobody in Port Gentil really cares about the central government of Gabon: Port Gentil is in effect an island at the mouth of southern Gabon's largest river. No highway or railroad connects it with the rest of Gabon and it's pretty much self-sufficient. Logs comes down the river to Port Gentil's sawmills, oil is beginning to be pumped from under Port Gentil, and ships come to take...