Word: tankerous
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...endlessly fought-over trans-Alaska pipeline. Far below sits a cluster of saucer-shaped storage tanks. Pairs of fat aluminum pipes stretch toward shipping berths 500 yds. out from shore at the tip of long, brightly lit piers. At one berth, the black shape of a tanker lies like a beached whale being fed intravenously. The tanker is hooked to four hydraulically powered feeder lines. All night long it will suck crude oil out of these cold mountains for the lamps and fires and engines of America...
...earthquake killed 31 people and forced the town to relocate. Then came a cultural and economic upheaval caused by the pipeline. Nearly 4,000 construction workers and $150-per-hour prostitutes swiftly turned Valdez into a rollicking boomtown. Life is calmer now. The construction workers have left, and the tanker trade has created lucrative permanent jobs. Valdez has a modern high school to show for its troubles and a small, gleaming new hospital to serve its 4,500 inhabitants. Doubtless in response to environmentalists' protest, the eight-member consortium that runs the terminal takes great care to maintain...
...that the trouble-plagued trans-Alaska pipeline is in full operation, Alaskan oil is flowing in great volume overland. But its journey to U.S. West Coast ports may soon be interrupted at sea -by icebergs in the tanker shipping lanes. The source of these floating hazards is the Columbia Glacier, a 425-sq.-mi. mass of ice that ends less than seven miles from the tanker lanes for Port Valdez...
...icebergs could drift southeastward into Prince William Sound and the waterways now used by supertankers ferrying oil south to virtually halt traffic. Explains Coast Guard Captain Ronald Kollmeyer: "When you have literally thousands of icebergs in the shipping lanes, you can't drive an 800-to 900-ft. tanker through that sort of gauntlet." Last August, the glacier's calving increased enough to force closing of the Valdez lanes to night traffic for nearly a week...
...miles of underused natural gas pipelines and construct 230 miles of new line to link Long Beach with Midland, Texas; from that point, the oil would head east through existing pipelines. The $500 million project could carry half a million barrels a day and would cost considerably less than tanker transport. The Government has strongly supported the idea for four years, but the project has bogged down while its backers await California permits...