Get Out of the Comedy Club

NOTE: This is a reprint from a paper, “If You Can’t Take a Joke, Get Out of the Comedy Club”, I wrote in college for Prof. Terrence Cole in 1999. The ongoing AGIA legislative special session reminded me of the insanity that was the building of TAPS. I’m sure that if the natural gas pipeline ever does get built we’ll hear similar stories like the one I discussed in my paper. Oh, and the tone of the paper was keeping inline with the tone of the class.

Construction of the Trans-Alaska Pipeline began in 1975 and ended in 1977, with the first crude flowing from the oil field at Prudhoe Bay in July 1977. Along the way oil companies learned many things about building pipelines that had never arisen before. The pipeline was not like the conventional pipelines that were simply buried in the ground and largely forgotten about until they either exploded or leaked so much that it became cost effective to fix them. The Trans-Alaska Pipeline required a special design so the underlying layer of frozen ground that existed for nearly 500 of the 800 miles of the length would not thaw and subsequently destroy the pipeline. The distance of the pipeline was great and so were the natural obstacles lying in the proposed path. Nearly 800 river crossings, four mountain ranges to overcome, and the Alaskan weather. While the temperature rises to 90 above in summer, it falls to 60 below in winter. This weather created not only the rivers, the tundra, the arctic coastal plain, the permafrost but also it formed an illogical image of Alaska as a location nearly uninviting as Antarctica.

While Alaska was known to the oil companies as a great and cold land, the Trans-Alaska Pipeline System, as initially designed, was only a 48-inch diameter pipe laid underground for 800 miles – as if it went from Fargo to Dallas. Prudhoe Bay to Valdez is not the ‘Great American Desert’, it is 5 distinct ecological regions: the Arctic Coast, the Brooks Mountain Range, the Interior, the Alaska Range, and the Northern Pacific Coast. Permafrost lies under the entire ground from Prudhoe to the Brooks Range, discontinuous until Fairbanks, and in isolated pockets to Valdez on the coast. 90° crude oil flowing in an uninsulated, underground pipe will thaw that permafrost – destroying its own foundation and creating an ecological, economical, and public relations nightmare for Alaska and the pipeline service company Alyeska. Fortunately for all parties involved, the pipeline was built with insulated pipes half underground and half above with rivers crossed either with bridges or sunken pipe. Environmentally, the completed pipeline was sound and successfully addressed nearly 100 percent of the problems initially raised. [FN1]  Still, the pipeline suffered great from human intelligence as the first year of service dawned.

Pump Station 8 is one of the twelve planned but eleven actual built pump stations along the pipeline. The object of a pump station is to “insure that crude oil continues travelling through the pipeline system at prescribed flow rates and pressure levels.” [FN2] To accomplish this if the oil flow rate is below pressure, booster pumps force the oil into centrifugal (or mainline) pumps powered by aircraft engine turbines, which send the oil back into the pipeline at the desired pressure. Each pump station has three mainline pumps and one turbine but only two pumps run at one time. As the first crude flowed down the pipeline on June 20th, 1977, only five pump stations were online because the initial capacity of the line was merely 600,000 barrels a day. As flow through the line hypothetically increased to 2 million barrels a day, stations 2, 5, 6, 7, 9, 11 (never built), and 12 would come online to help with the flow.

On Friday July 8, 1977 the first crude oil traveled to Pump Station 8, forty-one miles east of Fairbanks, along the Alaska Highway. As the crude entered and then passed through the station, everything went smoothly – as planned by Alyeska. A nitrogen leak that caused concern the previous Monday was fixed and the oil flowed constantly and within parameters until it reached 30 miles south of the station. The 390,000 barrels of oil flowing through the pipeline that day were part of the test run before the full load was going to be forced through. During the 10 weeks preceding July 8th pump station crews practiced daily working procedures at the station. One of these procedures was for maintenance workers to notify the rest of the station when work occurred. Even though the leading edge of oil was flowing 30 miles to the south of the station, the flow pressure dropped and an additional booster pump was needed. At this time workers were fixing one booster pump at the station yet other workers switched valves on to allow oil to flow through this pump. Miscommunication between Alyeska workers caused the destruction of the pump housing, the control building and the death of one employee, Charles Lindsey.

Instead of following the rules set for them by Alyeska, certain workers took it upon themselves to modify the rules because they did not apply to them. Safety is too often a second thought to getting the job done in time. Maintenance procedures included written notification of the work to other workers and closing valves to keep oil from entering the unit under repair. Since no notification was made to other pipeline workers, it was presumed, as it should be, that no repairs were being made on the booster pump. The Trans-Alaska Pipeline may be an engineering marvel to many across Alaska, pipeline workers marvelously ruined Pump Station 8 by assuming safety and not doing safety.

Maybe it was all a joke to these men near Fairbanks. As the crude shot in a geyser through the structure’s roof and ignited and the explosion destroying the control building, what were these workers thinking? They all were veteran pipeline workers. All had done construction work on the length of the pipeline and must have made mistakes before but nothing as serious as taking the life of a co-worker. To the laborers who toiled at the bottom of the pipeline food chain from 1975 until 1977, one phrase comes to mind when discussing pipeline mishaps. This phrase covered all mistakes be they major or minor, accidents or deliberately. [FN3]  “Fuck ‘em if they can’t take a joke.” Usually this quip was uttered not by the laborers but by the machine operators, those who had at their disposal millions of dollars worth of equipment. All ready to do damage to pipeline camp or be driven into ditches, rivers, or lakes. This casual accidental killing of another individual loomed over the pipeline for two weeks before Larry Wertz was arrested for attempting to blow up the pipeline.

Seventeen miles north of Fairbanks at 3 a.m. on July 20th, 1977, Wertz placed dynamite on the elevated portion of the pipeline and set them off. To his chagrin, only the pipeline insulation layer was damaged along with slight dents to the horizontal pipe supports. Five days later, as 26 year-old Wertz walked down a stretch of the Elliot Highway only 2 miles from the explosions, Alaska State Troopers arrested him. First lying to troopers by saying that he worked a mining claim then telling them that he was merely caretaking a claim and was in fact a fur trapper. The claim, just long of 2 miles from the pipeline, gave the troopers a hint that Wertz was behind the explosion as they found commercial dynamite at the site.

Still there was no motive behind Larry Wertz’s actions. After undergoing psychiatric examinations prior to his trial and during his trial, no reasons arose. He moved to Alaska in 1974 and worked as a laborer on the pipeline until 1976 when he began trapping near Fairbanks. His pipeline experience was near Delta and by all accounts he was no worse and no better than other laborers. One can conjecture that this act of destruction was nothing more than a joke. Wertz may have just wanted to see what would happen if he set off some dynamite on the pipe. He had some available to him at the mining claim, so why not? It may have been a mistake but as the adage goes, “fuck ‘em if they can’t take a joke.”

So much money was thrown at these men as they worked the pipeline. Upwards of $1000 a week at a time when $20,000 was a respectable yearly income for middle America. There existed no reason to respect your job, the pipeline, or others. You were going to get paid regardless of your ineptitude or quality. Making daily work interesting for as long as possible temporarily staved off the inevitable boredom. The pipeline was not a massive public works project that, in theory atleast, propels the good of the whole into some new era. The pipeline was a privately funded project for the sole purpose of further enriching the richest companies in the world. Filling the already bulging coffers of Exxon and British Petroleum with billions of consumer dollars is not exactly a religious experience.

By not caring what happens, the maintenance workers and Larry Wertz had gotten rich off the pipeline during construction. It didn’t matter to any of these men that living in that style is not safe to others nor appropriate to any society other than anarchy. It is said that all Alaskans are quasi-anarchists anyway so screwing with multi-national corporations is par for the course. The flip side to this logic is that Alaskans don’t like to be bothered by other people. This could be a reason for the multitude of cyclone fences and No Trespassing signs in the Interior region. Delving into the psychological motives of misguided pipeline workers is foolhardy at best; still these two mishaps can be summed up in the popular laborer phrase, “fuck ‘em if they can’t take a joke.”

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1. Pipeline crossings for migratory herd animals like caribou harm the natural cycles of the great arctic herds (Arctic and Western Porcupine) by being too far apart and not large enough in number. The Nelchina herd in the Copper River Basin has not been effected since its habit is mainly wooded and the animals are accustomed to obstructions. (Coates, P. The Trans-Alaska Pipeline Controversy page 267).
2. Alyeska Pipeline Service Company news release June 1977, quoted in Fairbanks Daily News-Miner Pumps Regulated Flow Rate, Pressure (July 9, 1977).
3. Ed McGrath The Alaska Pipeline, 1977 page 162.

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