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Ribbons of Oil

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U.S. / Canada pipeline

In March, six pipeline construction crews with a labour force of 1,500 men kicked off the job. The railways hauled 178,000 tons of high-test steel pipe to sidings near the right-of-way. The big ditching machines dug a trench three feet wide and five deep across the prairies. Behind the ditch­ers came the pipe stringers, the welders who joined the 40-foot sections into a continuous line, the crews and machines that cleaned, coated and lowered the pipe into the trench, backfilled the trench, and pressure test­ed the completed sections; finally came the clean-up crews.

The flat prairies offered relatively easy pipeline construction, but there were tough spots. One involved the crossing of the South Saskatchewan River near Outlook, Saskatchewan. The schedule called for completion of the crossing by the end of March prior to the spring thaw, while the water level was still at its winter low. "A race against time and the elements is in progress on the ice-bound South Saskatchewan River 10 miles south of Outlook," reported John Howard in the Regina Leader Post.13“Construction crews are battling the elements at their worst in their efforts to lay 3,144 feet of the Interprovincial oil pipeline eight feet below the riverbed before the ice breaks up. So far the crews have had to contend with a two-day blizzard, a sandstorm, and biting sub-zero winds."

The plan was to string the pipe in 80-foot lengths across the ice, weld it, coat and wrap it, sheath it with board slats to prevent damage to the pipe, and attach 2,800-pound concrete river clamps every 20 feet. A four-foot swath would be cut through the ice, drag lines would dig a six-foot trench through the river bottom, and the pipe would be rolled off the ice into the trench. But the spring thaw had already started to swell the river and when the ice was cut the water burst through and flooded the operation, forcing the crews to retreat and make a second attempt at a new location. This sec­ond attempt was too late. The ice was starting to thaw, and in one day four Caterpillar tractors broke through into six feet of water and had to be yard­ed out. The attempt to cross the river while it was still frozen had to be abandoned, and a new set of engineering plans drawn up to lay the pipe across the open river.14

At a ceremony in Edmonton on October 4, Alberta Premier Ernest Manning turned the valve which started Alberta oil flowing on its two-month journey to refineries across the prairies and into Sarnia. The IPL line, noted C.D. Howe, "will stop a drain on our economy of at least $150 million U.S. dollars a year which we are now spending for foreign crude." He described it as "an essential factor in our preparedness for the defence of Canada."15

Before the line was in operation, however, it was evident that addition­al capacity was required, and the following year marked the start of five decades of almost continuous expansion and growth of the IPL system. Work in 1951 and 1952 involved the initial looping of the IPL system, the laying of 100 miles of 16-inch line beside the original line in sections between Regina and the U.S. border crossing at Gretna, and additional pumping horsepower, to increase the throughput capacity.

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