Word: saharan
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...between them, two French oil firms-one 80% government-owned, the other 30% government-owned -have spent an estimated $300 million on Hassi Messaoud and its 40 producing oil wells. Similar sums are being spent at the Sahara's other major field-Edjelé -and 900 miles of Saharan pipeline will cost at least another $60 million...
...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...
...week in five, Soustelle flies off to the Sahara, where he functions as a kind of one-man Cabinet. As the top political authority in France's two Saharan departments (Saoura and Oases), Soustelle supervises the affairs of 93 municipal governments that he has established in the desert, bears responsibility for the security of Reggan, France's atomic test area in the Sahara. And as chief of O.C.R.S. (Common Organization for the Saharan Regions), he is empowered to negotiate pacts with the four newly independent African members of the French Community who share the western and southern Sahara...
...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...
Though only 30,000 strong (among a French Saharan population of 840,000), the Mozabites occupy a crucial area, so rich is it in oil. The descendants of a persecuted splinter group of Moslems that took refuge in their present inaccessible home back in the Middle Ages, they do not allow their wives to unveil even for the dentist. But they have been shrewd in jumping aboard the oil bandwagon, and French officials estimate that there are already at least a score of franc billionaires among the Mozabites. "France never has and never will tamper with your faith and customs...