Front End

All Aboard for Jobs

In the early days of rail travel in the United States, towns sprouted and thrived along new lines, such as the Camden & Amboy Railroad beside the Delaware River in southern New Jersey.

History is repeating itself on that route, as a Bechtel-built light-rail line spurs the rejuvenation of 19 historic towns between Trenton and Camden. The RiverLINE is a $1 billion investment in the industrial corridor—an invitation to employers and commuters to hop aboard, reduce traffic congestion, build businesses, and create jobs. More than 4,000 jobs were created during construction. Since it opened in March, at least 200 new permanent jobs have been attributed to RiverLINE.

Bringing in the Big Gun

Question: Now that atmospheric and underground testing of nuclear weapons has ceased, how can the United States know if its deterrent remains safe and reliable? One answer: The Joint Actinide Shock Physics Experimental Research “gas gun”—called JASPER—housed at the Bechtel-managed Nevada Test Site near Las Vegas. JASPER is a critical tool for subcritical dynamic material testing—trials that do not involve a chain reaction—and a key component of the U.S. government’s nuclear stockpile stewardship program.

The 30-meter-long device fires a projectile into a small plutonium target. Diagnostic equipment then measures the target’s properties during the microsecond that a high-pressure shock wave passes through it. The measurements help scientists better understand plutonium’s behavior under the extraordinarily high pressures of a nuclear explosion. This information, combined with results from many other tests of non-nuclear weapons parts, helps determine the reliability of the stockpile.

A Cursor Course in Safety

A new interactive training course on Bechtel’s intranet is helping employees recognize and avoid on-the-job safety hazards. The Bechtel Safety Simulator puts users in a virtual, 360-degree panorama of a construction site, where they participate in prejob safety analyses, observe construction, interact with workers, and take action to identify and resolve safety hazards. At present, the simulator focuses on training to prevent falls—the leading cause of death in the construction industry. The company will soon expand the simulator’s programs to cover numerous other safety issues.

High-speed Connection

Shortly after Bechtel was asked to repair telecommunications infrastructure in postconflict Iraq, team leaders met to discuss the project in the looted, darkened headquarters of the Iraqi Telephone and Post Company. Their first task: reconstructing Baghdad’s 12 destroyed telephone exchanges by installing new digital switches.

They faced a monumental challenge. Their largely Iraqi workforce remained cautious about deadlines, still intimidated by the
former regime’s draconian punishments for failure. And during the first few months of work, vandals and thieves stripped the system of vital equipment and copper cabling.

But by March 2004, Bechtel had brought all 12 exchanges back to life, enabling the reconnection of 240,000 subscriber lines. Bechtel also installed a new international satellite gateway to handle calls to and from Iraq. Meanwhile, a new Bechtel-designed network operations center was installed, and work is under way to restore and upgrade a 665-kilometer portion of the fiber-optic backbone connecting major cities in southern Iraq with Baghdad—critical to the country’s redevelopment.

Bechtel Buzz

"Bechtel's efforts will help save the lives of children"

—Andrew Natsios, administrator of the U.S. Agency for International Development, referring to Bechtel’s infrastructure reconstruction efforts in Iraq.

An Olympic Achievement

Many who come to Athens for the upcoming Olympic Games will explore the great public works projects of ancient Greece. Along the way, they also may take
advantage of the country’s most ambitious recent project.

Construction of Athens’ Metro subway system, which began in 1992, was a Herculean task amid fragile 3,000-year-old ruins. The extensive excavations of the ancient central city are history now—completed in phases under Bechtel management starting in January 2000. The streets are repaved, the buildings reinforced, and some of the Metro’s 28 new stations double as marble-lined museums exhibiting artifacts uncovered in construction.

Most important, travel has become easier in a city known for traffic jams of mythological proportions. The new subway system will make it easier for everyone as thousands of athletes, employees, journalists, and spectators converge on the ancient city next month.

An Idea Whose Time Has Come

To mix maxims: “Necessity is the mother of invention and success has many fathers.” But perhaps nowhere has the need to invent and the desire to succeed had as many progenitors as at the Bechtel-managed Idaho National Engineering and Environmental Laboratory.

This year, the lab’s annual Inventors’ Recognition Banquet honored 100 inventors whose creations include new environmental and energy technologies, research into AIDS treatment, and a new method of ultrasonic weld inspection. Past honorees have invented everything from better ways to plant seeds to a process for predicting metal fatigue in bridges. It’s all part of the lab’s mission—contributing to U.S. nuclear energy, environmental quality, national security, and science. Inventors come from throughout the organization and include scientists, engineers, software authors, and craft workers.

Missile Defense on Target

In remote, wind-swept central Alaska, six white domes rise like igloos under careful guard. The domes are actually clamshell-shaped doors that conceal 21-meter-deep missile silos in the frozen earth. Work is ahead of schedule at the Fort Greeley test bed, where Bechtel is helping Boeing develop the U.S. government’s Ground-based Midcourse Defense system. GMD gives the United States a vital defense against incoming warheads. The imminent completion of the Alaska facility fulfills a 2002 government promise to introduce missile defense this year.

To deliver on such a tight schedule, Bechtel has brought flexibility and real-life experience to a rough-weather program that’s constantly changing. For each of the last three short building seasons, between April and October, Bechtel drafted a list of objectives, including a goal of completing enclosures so that teams could work indoors through the winters, and off-site manufacturing of certain project modules for shipping and trucking to the site in spring.

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