Narrator: In mid-December 1975, extreme cold forced welding crews off the line for six weeks. Three hundred seventy-one miles of pipe was in place, just short of Moolin's 400-mile target.
So far, they'd beaten back every challenge with money and brute force. But a new crisis was about to hit, and this one threatened to take down the entire project.
Early in 1976 the national media reported that thousands of welds made in the previous year might be fatally flawed.
Walter Cronkite (archival): The Transportation Department, which sets safety standards for all pipelines, opens new hearings tomorrow on the trouble-plagued Alaska Pipeline. Those troubles threaten the fragile Alaskan environment, the timetable for delivering oil to the rest of the country, and the price of that oil.
Narrator: Every one of the 108,000 pipeline welds was supposed to be x-rayed, inspected for flaws, and certified... an enormous task that quickly overwhelmed the companies hired to do the job.
Bill Fowler: One of the subcontractors got behind and pulled a trick that had been learned in the industry long before, is that you find a good weld and you x-ray it 10 or 15 times from a different angle and then call it ten or fifteen different x-rays and then say, well, the next 15 joints are in good shape, now we can move ahead and you get caught up.
When the deception came to light, it was a major scandal and Congress demanded answers from those in charge.
Bill Howitt: It was disastrous because it threw the whole quality control program and quality assurance program for everything on the pipeline into question. It was like, well, if something as simple as an x-ray, you know, can't get done right, what, what else is buried?
Until Frank Moolin's people could sort out which x-rays had been faked, all 30,800 field welds to-date were under suspicion.
By laboriously crosschecking every x-ray, they were able to find the all the duplicates and narrow the number of suspects to 3955. More than half were in buried pipe, some beneath rivers.
Bill Howitt: You're already schedule driven, you've got every resource stressed, all right, now you're going to go out and dig up hundreds of existing places and x-ray them and re-weld them if you have to. And in the case of several river crossings actually go back in a couple of miles under a river and look at the weld.
Narrator: In the end, some 1900 welds needed minor repair. Another thirty-seven had to be cut out and re-done. It was an expensive and embarrassing setback. But the schedule suffered the most damage.
To get the oil flowing in 1977, they had to finish welding pipe before winter set in at the end of 1976, and that was looking more and more doubtful.
Bill Fowler: The owners told Frank that he could spend up to an additional $10 million dollars a day as long as what he spent it on would save a day.
