Milestones

Awards · Announcements · Appointments

METRORAIL EXTENSION

USA Dulles Transit Partners, a partnership led by Bechtel, has been selected by the Virginia Department of Rail and Public Transportation to plan and construct an extension of Washington, D.C.’s rail transit system. When completed, the project will extend the existing 166-kilometer system by 37 kilometers to Dulles International Airport and Loudoun County, Virginia. The line will be built in two phases. Preliminary engineering began in mid-2004.

NONPROLIFERATION AWARD

RUSSIA The Center for Policy Studies—a nonprofit, independent research and education organization—has presented Bechtel with its award for Efficient Support of Nonproliferation Values. The award recognizes the company’s work to secure, safeguard, and eliminate weapons of mass destruction in the former Soviet Union, under the Cooperative Threat Reduction program.

Copper Concentrator Completion

CHILE Bechtel has completed a $260 million expansion of the Collahuasi copper concentrator, 4,200 meters above sea level in the Atacama Desert. Bechtel designed and constructed the original Collahuasi facility for Compania Minera Dona Ines de Collahuasi in 1998. The expansion will help increase copper production to 460,000 tonnes per year.

SAFETY FIRST

HAND SAFETY A recent report in Occupational Hazards, a leading magazine of safety, health, and loss prevention, cites Bechtel’s hand-protection record as among the United States’ best. In 2003, the same publication called Bechtel one of “America’s Safest Companies.”

SAFE IN THE SAHARA Customer BP has awarded Bechtel’s In Salah pipeline project in Algeria its “Best in Class” award for safety performance.

STELLAR SAFETY RECORDS:
  • In the USA, Las Vegas’ McCarran International Airport project has reached 1.2 million hours without a lost-time accident.
  • The Kwajalein missile defense project in the Marshall Islands, 1.4 million hours.
  • Jorge Chavez International Airport in Peru, 2.7 million hours.
  • Agip Kazakhstan artificial islands project in the Caspian Sea, 2.6 million hours.
  • Alba smelter expansion in Bahrain, 4.8 million hours.
  • Darwin liquefied natural gas project in Australia, 1.3 million hours.

NUCLEAR WORK

USA The Omaha Public Power District has awarded Bechtel two contracts for equipment replacement at its Fort Calhoun Station in Nebraska. Under one agreement, Bechtel will replace a steam generator, a reactor pressure vessel head, and a pressurizer. The other contract covers replacement of condenser tubes in the plant’s cooling system. The work will occur during scheduled outages over the next three years.

STEAM GENERATOR REPLACEMENT

USA TXU Power has awarded Bechtel a $100 million contract to replace four steam generators in Unit One of the company’s Comanche Peak nuclear station in Glen Rose, Texas. Preliminary engineering has begun, with replacement of the steam generators to occur in the second quarter of 2007. Bechtel was involved with the original construction of Unit 1 in the 1980s and Unit 2, which was completed in 1993.

INDUSTRIAL PROJECT

CHINA Plantronics, a leader in communications headsets, has awarded Bechtel a contract for the design and construction of a three-story office building and manufacturing plant. The campus-like project, in the Suzhou Industrial Park, 80 kilometers west of Shanghai, is scheduled for completion in late 2005.

Nuclear Society Appointment

USA Bechtel Nuclear President Jim Reinsch will serve as president of the American Nuclear Society from June 2005 until June 2006. He currently is vice president of the nonprofit scientific and educational organization, which has 10,500 members worldwide and is marking its 50th anniversary this year.

MANAGEMENT MOVES

Tim Statton, formerly president of Bechtel Enterprises, has been appointed president of Bechtel’s Telecommunications global business unit. Eric Grenfell takes over as president of Bechtel Enterprises. George Conniff, formerly president of the Telecommunications unit, now leads the company’s engineering, procurement, and construction functions and Six Sigma organizations. David Walker is the new president of Bechtel’s Fossil Power unit. Matt Wiley, who was program director for the company’s Boston Central Artery/Tunnel project for the past five years, has been named manager of operations for Bechtel Infrastructure Corporation. Mike Thiele is now Bechtel’s manager of special operations.

CLOSER

Coming Through
Bechtel faced some extraordinary challenges in the four years it worked on the Croatian Motorway.

First, a government land acquisition process that couldn’t keep up with construction delayed work. Then the government accelerated the construction schedule to capture August vacationers’ auto tolls. Finally, of the 91 days from April to June 2004 the project lost 52 days to rain.

But challenges and solutions go hand in hand. The venture’s community relations team won the trust of landowners, who granted access to most of the alignment. Then managers added 1,000 workers, sped equipment to the project, and moved to a round-the-clock schedule.

Bechtel came through: the job was completed by late July—ahead of schedule.

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