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National Geographic : 1950 Mar
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The National Geographic Magazine tion-the 1,067-mile-long trans-Arabian pipe line, or "tapline," as oil men call it, from the Abqaiq oil fields to the Mediterranean. Ten thousand miles from their source of supplies in the United States, engineers of the Arabian American Oil Company faced a thou sand miles of trackless, waterless, uninhabited desert. With no port for unloading ships, they had the problem of laying here the biggest pipe line ever built for oil transporta tion, complete with all the intricate machinery needed for pumping stations and terminals. To save shipping space, the pipe was made in alternating 31- and 30-inch diameters so one section would fit inside another. To form the 31-foot sections, 270,000 tons of steel were used. Tiny, almost unknown Ras al Mish'ab was selected as an unloading point, and a three mile aerial tramway was built out over the shallow water to reach the ships. The car riages on this "sky hook" can carry ten tons to the load. For hauling 50-ton loads of pipe across trackless desert, a special truck trailer was designed. After thorough tests in Arizona's desert, 150 of these monsters were ordered. When unloaded from the ships, the pipe is welded into three-section units 93 feet long. Each huge truck with its dollies carries nine or ten of these over the desert. In all, 1,500 transportation units were moved to the job. They included 120 10 ton trucks, 80 refrigerator trucks, 60 tank trucks for fuel and water, ten 60-passenger trailers, and four 60-passenger buses, in addi tion to the many bulldozers, tractors, and other heavy machines used for excavating and lay ing the line. New Desert Towns Created Six pumping stations are being built along the route, each planned as a stable community of some 20 American families and 200 or more Arab family groups. At each station, wells ranging in depth from 250 to 1,000 feet are being dug and 250,000-gallon water storage facilities are being provided for American per sonnel and for the Arabs and their flocks. These stations are shown on the map and will undoubtedly become the metropolitan centers of this desert region. Between the major stations lie five inter mediate posts where wells and 10,000-gallon water storage facilities are provided. Planned for completion by the beginning of 1951, the line will take 4,922,000 barrels of oil just to fill the pipe, with another 2,000, 000 barrels in reserve for use at the stations and terminals. Thus nearly 7,000,000 barrels will be re quired at all times just to keep the line in use. That is more than three times as much oil as the whole Eastern Hemisphere produced in a day in 1948. The entire world now pro duces only about nine and a half million barrels a day. Once in operation, this line will deliver about 300,000 barrels a day at Sidon, on the Lebanon coast. This amount is more than twice as much as Europe (without Russia) produces in a day, and it equals about half of Russia's daily production. Few New Railways; Roads Deceptive Little railroad building has taken place in Africa since World War II. In southern Tanganyika a new railroad runs inland from Lindi and Mtwara as part of Great Britain's peanut-producing enterprise (page 334). A 400-mile railroad financed by oil royal ties is being built by American engineers from the Persian Gulf oil port of Dammam west across the Saudi Arabian desert to Riyadh, the inland capital. Red lines on the map show roads, but most of them are bad and are completely impassable during the rainy season. Around Lake Chad the roads are submerged for several months each year. Motor transport now crosses the Sahara, but in specially equipped vehicles. One does not tour the desert in the family car. There are really two Africas-Mediter ranean Africa, closely allied to Europe, and long-isolated southern Africa, south of the Sahara. Since the days of ancient Egypt, Greece, Carthage, and Rome, North Africa's his tory, economics, and politics have been inter woven with the unfolding fabric of Western civilization. Even the World War II penetra tion of Europe's not-so-soft "underbelly" from Africa was history repeating itself. More than 2,000 years before, the armies of African Carthage invaded Spain and Roman Italy. In Mediterranean Africa, desert dictates where people can live. Though African Egypt contains 362,900 square miles, virtually all of its 19,049,000 people live on 13,500 square miles-the Nile Valley, Delta, and a few oases. South of the Mediterranean fringe, a broad band of desert, covering some 15 degrees of latitude, long blocked European travel into southern Africa even more thoroughly than the Atlantic Ocean once isolated America from Europe. Here in Africa's deep south, many Negro cultures grew in isolation from the rest of the world for unknown thousands of years. Anthropologists probing the history of man 398
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