PIPE LINE OVER DESERT.

Star (Christchurch), Volume XLIV, Issue 741, 20 April 1933, Page 1

PIPE LINE OVER DESERT.

Scheme to Save Million Pounds a Year. LONDON, April 10. The £10,000,000 pipe-line which the Iraq Petroleum Company is laying to the Mediterranean is the most remarkable enterprise in the Middle East today. says the Palestine correspondent of the “ Manchester Guardian.” The line runs from Kirkuk to Haditha, where it divides, one section going to Haifa, 620 miles away, and the other to the Mediterranean, 540 miles away, each going through 300 miles of desert. While the coastal line passes under a great lava bed which resembles a shelled area, thousands of workers in the desert must receive water and supplies from more hospitable lands, necessitating the construction of hundreds of miles of metalled roads to carry lorries and huge construction machines. Three thousand men are at present turning the Arab village of Mafrak into a replica of Kantara in war time. , The pipe-laying involves four main operations. The stringing of the 12-inch pipes along the desert is proceeding at the rate of nearly a mile a day. Each piece of pipe, 40 feet long, weighs almost a ton. Then the ditching is performed bja remarkable machine which makes furrows across the desert at the rate of a mile a day until it strikes lava rock, which must be blasted. Arabs follow, widening and deepening the ditch. Next come welders using giant apparatus, brought to- white heat by a travelling generator, after which the pipes, painted and tarred and wrapped in asphalt and canvas, are finally buried by another machine.

Twelve pumping machines will be installed at various points, to force oil through the pipes. The pipe line will enable Suez Canal dues amounting to £1,000,000 a year to be • avoided.