Word: projects
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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Thinking big was Steve Bechtel's forte. He learned to appreciate scale as the primary manager in the building of Hoover Dam in the early '30s, then the largest public works project in U.S. history. The wartime shipyards Bechtel organized would build 560 vessels--up to 20 ships a month--between 1941 and 1945, an astounding output even in an era of production miracles...
Bechtel was, and remained throughout his nearly 70-year career, a visionary whose imagination was fired by grandiose projects--the more seemingly impossible the better. His motto, endlessly repeated, was "We'll build anything for anybody, no matter what the location, type or size." He and his company built pipelines and power plants in the forbidding reaches of the Canadian Rockies, across the Arabian desert and through South American jungles, as well as in daunting places like downtown Boston, where the Central Artery project unfolds today. His portfolio even includes an entire city (Jubail, Saudi Arabia). Bechtel built...
...always peering over the horizon. In the 1920s he foresaw an energy boom and took the company into pipeline construction. Later he helped pioneer the now common "turnkey" construction contract, under which Bechtel would design a project, build it, and turn it over to the owner by a set date, for a fixed fee. In 1959 he helped produce a study for a tunnel under the English Channel, a project finally realized this decade...
...excavated 3.7 million cu. yds. of rock and poured 4.4 million cu. yds. of concrete; the main arch of the dam towers 70 stories high. Steve was first in charge of transportation, engineering and administration. When his father died suddenly in 1933, he became chief executive of the whole project, which transformed the economy of much of the West, as well as transforming the company...
...million project, like the Suez Canal that preceded it, was an epic assault on nature that employed as many as 43,400 workers at a time--many of whom succumbed to yellow fever while clearing the mosquito-infested swamps. More than 211 million cu. yds. of earth and rock were moved to unite the Atlantic and Pacific oceans. The canal cut the voyage from New York to California by 7,800 miles. Leased by the U.S., it returns to Panamanian sovereignty...