THE LINK: JULY 2024 32 Dave Haugen’s book details the pursuit of Alaskan oil BY BARBARA NORTON It was late at night in San Francisco when the phone in Dave Haugen’s hotel room rang. The year was 1974 and Frank Moolin Jr. was on the line, the man in charge of mainline pipeline construction for the Trans-Alaska Pipeline. Moolin was unsatisfied with the slow pace of construction on the haul road, the supply line for the pipeline. He had a message for Haugen: pack your bags and get up to Fairbanks. This call marked the beginning of Haugen’s involvement with the construction of the haul road, which celebrates its 50th anniversary this year. Haugen, who came to Alaska in 1964 from Minnesota, first heard about the Trans-Alaska Pipeline project while enlisted in the U.S. Army. He was determined to return to the State of Alaska and join the project. “All the newspaper articles, magazine articles, everything else talked about it being the largest privately-financed project in the U.S. Having that occur in Alaska, and the magnitude of the project, was a fatal attraction,” Haugen said. Haugen’s experience with the Trans-Alaska Pipeline — beginning with surveying, then project management on the haul road, and eventually the pipeline itself — is the focus of his new book, “One Man’s Pipeline: Surveying to Startup.” Published earlier this year, the book comes 50 years after Haugen answered that fateful call in San Francisco. Haugen joined the Alyeska Pipeline Service Company as a project manager during construction of the haul road, a crucial supply-route for the Trans-Alaska pipeline. During construction of the haul road, Haugen was based at Five Mile Camp — named for being five miles north of the Yukon River, and the first construction camp along the haul road. Even then, Haugen knew that he was building history. “Every day, we were out clearing the land in front of the road and winding it through virgin Alaskan wilderness. It was the true feeling of pioneering a new route from the Yukon River to Prudhoe, and it was definitely thrilling because we could get out and see progress getting made,” Haugen said. Accompanying this spirit of pioneering, however, was the grueling, “relentless” pace of work on the haul road. In his book, Haugen describes the scene at Five Mile Camp as “chaos” when he arrived. “We had to rebuild the Five Mile Camp to make it larger and at the same time we were doing construction on the haul road itself,” Haugen said. Ninety-five beds in the camp had been expanded to 570 to accommodate the new workers. The standard shifts, recalls Haugen, were “seven-twelves” — seven days a week, twelve hours a day. “And that doesn’t include the time needed to eat and sleep,” he added. The pace of construction was frenetic: expanding Five Mile Camp, mining and hauling gravel to create new pieces of road, and building the Yukon River Bridge, all in a race against the clock. The work didn’t end there, however. “Everything we were touching required a permit of some kind,” said Haugen. Much of his time was spent ensuring the proper permits to avoid bureaucratic snaggles and stalls in production. “We were determined to keep the pace of construction moving forward as fast as we could,” he said. This pace of production was difficult to handle for some workers. The people who stayed on the project were those who could handle the intense pressure, including Haugen. “I was able to just keep on with it, and once we turned the corner and got it physically completed, we knew we had won the battle.” Haugen’s capacity for relentless, difficult work is perhaps rooted in his farming experience. Born and raised in Minnesota, Haugen worked on farms growing up, and the demands of farming often paralleled that of the haul road construction. For farmers, Haugen explained, “if they don’t get the seed planted then they’re not going to get the harvest done in time, and that can be catastrophic.” The same was true for the haul road, which needed to be completed so that pipeline work could begin. For both tasks, “the only way through is working hard. The work has to get done and it doesn’t make any difference how you feel. You still have to get up there and get after it,” he said. Chronicling 50 years of Haul Road history
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