`Alaskan Pipeline construction`

The US Navy found the plates that had the problems, that started the fractures in the Liberty ships, were on the average of about five foot-pounds. So one of the recommendations of that Navy inquiry was that the Navy require ten foot-pounds — they doubled the amount of fracture energy that they found empirically had caused problems. Then people decided, well, we should put a safety factor on top of the ten foot-pound, so they made it fifteen foot-pounds. By 1960, the Coast Guard had decided, well, we should put a bigger safety factor than just fifteen foot-pounds, we'll make it twenty foot-pounds. So now we're four times what the Navy found was causing problems. I remember when I was working at a steel company, and the guy in the office right next to me was in charge of what we call line pipe — the steel pipe for things like the Alaskan pipeline. They were building the Alaskan pipeline in the mid '70s, and they had plans to build other pipelines, and they wanted to have something that would really act tough, that tough steel, and they wanted sixty or seventy foot-pounds. It starts getting pricey to make steels that are that tough.