The story of the building of the trans-Alaska pipeline

Oil, hot crude, flows from the richest wells on the frozen arctic shore. So much effort at such great cost to be ready to carry a 12 million barrel daily capacity. It took $8 billion, 20,000 workers, 12-hour days, and 7-day weeks, to finish it in three years, inside the deadline. First, they built the road, 360 miles long, supplying 30 construction camps, using extra gravel to insulate the permafrost. Then they needed supports to raise up the pipeline to prevent it from heating up the ground. Half of the pipeline rests on 78,000 supports, 60 feet apart.

It's a new design for constructing to be part of the land so caribou can march under it, and earthquakes can rock and sway it. Then the pipe; 70,000 sections joined and laid, then buries or raised, crossing 3 mountain ranges, 800 riverbeds, tundra, forests, and lakes, all the way from the arctic to the pacific. And now, from the richest oil field in America, 35,000 gallons of oil can flow every minute through a 48-inch pipe stretched 800 miles, the length of Alaska, to the ice-free port of Valdez. In April, 1974, it began with the haul road, and on August 1, 1977, this film documented the first tanker leaving for the south, full of oil.