40 Years at Prudhoe: Engineer recalls Prudhoe Bay early days

Oil companies relied on cadre of talented individuals and contractors to design and build unprecedented Arctic infrastructure

Rose Ragsdale

For Petroleum News

From the start, developing the Prudhoe Bay oil field was a gargantuan task.

In the words of O.C. Simpson, “It was a time of impossible demands and incredible feats.”

But Atlantic Richfield Co. and British Petroleum, the two oil companies designated to operate North America’s largest oil field, elected to start small, hiring a few very capable and clever people to oversee the effort.

Bob Bell was one such individual. Hired as a facility engineer by ARCO in 1974, Bell said he took the job to help keep his struggling surveying business afloat. While his partner, John Herring, continued to serve their clients, Bell worked for ARCO and split his salary with Herring.

Bell was one of three people who comprised the entire Prudhoe Bay facilities group for the company.

“Joe Dan Ash, a document control clerk and I were in charge of constructing the Prudhoe Bay facilities for ARCO,” recalled Bell in a recent interview.

Bell worked directly with the big engineering firms that designed the field, Ralph M. Parsons and Bechtel Inc., and hired construction contractors to build the facilities and infrastructure. These contractors included such firms as Alaska General, Frontier Construction, Haskell Amelco, S.S. Muellins and H.C. Price.

Among the memorable early projects that Bell’s group tackled: Installing multi-plates in the Put River; building roads across the field; and constructing the West Dock causeway. The causeway is a gravel embankment that juts into the Beaufort Sea and enables the off-loading of cargo that otherwise could not be delivered to the Arctic oil field.

Bell said the pace of the work was so pressured in the early days of development by weather, the short summer season and other uncertainties that construction often outpaced design.

“We’d finish a section of roadway and the engineers wouldn’t have designs ready for the next section,” he recalled. “We would build a mile of road, praying our work would be close to the designs, and a week later, we’d get the drawings.”

An especially harrowing point came during the first phase of constructing the West Dock causeway, while a barge waited to unload production modules for the field, Bell remembered.

“When we put that last gravel in, two days later the ice came back. We were stopped. We couldn’t go any further,” he said.

Bell made a phone call to his boss, Hoyt Jarvis, and was told, “I don’t care if you have to spend a million dollars, get those modules off that barge.

“The ice was 6 feet thick. We used a ditch witch to cut out a 10-foot section of the ice at a time. As soon as we’d get a section of ice out, we would dump gravel in the hole we made. In this way, we continued to build the causeway,” Bell said. “We worked through Christmas Day.”

The prospect of the work continuing through Christmas upset the workers union, and just before the holiday, Bell said he got a call from the union’s business agent, saying he wanted to visit the North Slope to inspect the trucks that ARCO’s contractors were using.

Bell said he understood that this was a ploy for the union to get the workers off on Christmas and Christmas Eve by finding something wrong with the truck fleet.

Bell said he told Tennessee Miller of Frontier about the proposed visit, and Miller volunteered to give the business agent a tour.

Then Bell told Miller that someone would need to pick the business agent up at the local airport.

Miller replied, “I’m the guy who will show them around, but I ain’t no taxicab driver.”

After that, Bell said he heard nothing else from the union about shutting down for Christmas.

During his tenure with ARCO, Bell said his group supervised the building of the main construction camp, all the production pads in the field, bridges over the Sag River and most of the roads.

Bell left ARCO in 1976, after two years, to concentrate on his business. Today, he is sole proprietor of Bell & Associates, one of the largest survey firms in Alaska with 100 employees.