A Quiet Ambition at Work

It takes a special sort of gumption to build a new bridge over the grave of an old one, particularly when the first span blew apart in one of the great engineering disasters of the 20th century.

A mere four months after the Tacoma Narrows Bridge opened in 1940, it bucked and swayed and plunged in a brisk wind. A replacement was built a decade later and still stands, but for civil engineers Galloping Gertie remains the more vivid presence.

“I studied the collapse in graduate school,” says Joe Collins, part of a team now building a new bridge at the site. “Most of us did. When my advisor learned I was coming here, he said, ‘Make sure we’re not teaching your bridge in future classes.’ ”

The steel-and-concrete structure will be the longest new suspension bridge in this country since 1964 and an unusual example of a new span constructed alongside an existing one. That makes it a routinely unprecedented effort for Bechtel Group Inc., the San Francisco construction and engineering firm that is co-managing the project.

Bechtel prides itself on the monumental. Its achievements include Hoover Dam, the English Channel Tunnel, the San Francisco and Portland light-rail systems, the first major pipeline across the Middle East and the San Francisco-Oakland Bay Bridge. Bechtel worked on the design or construction of more than half of the nuclear power plants in the U.S. and is building a city for 300,000 in the Arabian desert.

But it has never undertaken anything quite like its latest mission, which will happen a world away from this green and wet spot.

Seven weeks ago, Bechtel won a secret, invitation-only U.S. government contract to rebuild Iraq. The work of repairing hospitals, schools, government buildings and roads will get underway in earnest this summer under an 18-month, $680-million contract. Experts see the contract as a first step, and say the deal could ultimately be worth billions if the Bush administration is serious about substantially upgrading Iraq’s infrastructure.

It’s nation-building on a scale never before attempted by the U.S. government, much less a single company. The spotlight has been intense, with criticism surfacing in the media and in the streets.

Activists decrying “the corporate invasion of Iraq” tried to block the entrance to Bechtel’s headquarters Thursday. Forty-three were arrested. The protests were a sequel to a much bigger demonstration in late March, which also resulted in dozens of arrests. Meanwhile, newspaper editorials and columnists talk darkly of insider connections at Bechtel that date from the Reagan administration.

Bechtel is no stranger to criticism. A retired Massachusetts judge was recently appointed to lead an investigation of massive cost-overruns in a $14.6-billion highway project in Boston -- dubbed the Big Dig -- that Bechtel is co-managing. Bechtel says it looks forward to a “fair, objective, and expert review of its record.”

Bechtel also drew the wrath of anti-globalization activists after a partially owned subsidiary began operating the water system in the Bolivian city of Cochabamba in late 1999. Rates were raised to pay for improvements in the system, which sparked riots. In April 2000, the Bolivian government canceled the contract -- which a Bechtel spokesman chalked up to politics.

All the scorn perplexes and infuriates the company, the largest privately owned firm in California. Bechtel’s Web site chastises journalists for “uncritically reporting innuendo from partisan organizations and political critics.” It says allegations of “friends in high places” are “specious or irrelevant.” Executives forcefully reject descriptions of Bechtel as a sort of malign behemoth.

“We are a tiny, tiny part of a highly fragmented industry,” says Bechtel Principal Vice President Jim Illich. “This business is as tough as a night in jail.”

Indeed, the company is misunderstood, Illich and other executives say. Partly that’s because few ever see the real Bechtel, which isn’t at the headquarters. It’s in the field, out where the vast majority of the company’s 47,000 employees work on dozens of multiyear projects worth as much as or more than the Iraq contract.

Which brings us to Tacoma, a quite different sort of job than Iraq: one tricky bridge to be built over many years versus a whole country refurbished as quickly as possible.

Yet in Iraq and Tacoma, Bechtel has an identical goal, the same one it always has in its construction projects. It intends to create something that works and then move on, leaving not so much as a plaque behind.

In other words, what’s true of the bridge is also true of Iraq: If Bechtel’s work there is taught in the classrooms of the future, if it is remembered at all, that will be proof of its failure.

*

A visitor to the Tacoma Narrows construction site will search in vain for signs of Bechtel’s involvement. At the concrete supply station, it says Glacier Northwest. A pickup truck parked under the current bridge says General Construction Co. A highway ramp is being built by crews whose vehicles are labeled Wilson Construction Co. and Pilchuck Contractors.

Even the folks who come directly from Bechtel or its co-manager, Omaha-based Peter Kiewit Sons’ Inc., are advised to downplay their affiliations. Several Kiewit employees arrived with cars emblazoned with the company name. The vehicles were repainted.

“I want people to lose their identity for a few years,” says project chief Manuel Rondon. Since Bechtel employees are proud of it, this is a difficult message.

“Some are less understanding than others,” Rondon says.

Perhaps, he adds, the name Bechtel will appear in invitations for the bridge’s inauguration, scheduled for 2007. Then he rejects even that possibility: They will say Tacoma Narrows Constructors, the name Bechtel and Kiewit are working under.

Blending in seamlessly is part of the Bechtel philosophy of living in the community, of literally becoming the community, for the duration of a mission.

But keeping a low profile also has strategic value. Gig Harbor wasn’t a war zone like Iraq but feelings nonetheless ran high, despite the troubles the current bridge was causing.

The span, which provides a shortcut to the Olympic Peninsula from Seattle, is used by 90,000 cars a day. Its lanes are two feet smaller than the standard 12-foot width, which has helped make head-on collisions dismayingly common. On Oct. 29, there were two separate crashes on the bridge, killing two people and seriously injuring a third.

A second bridge will reduce the danger and improve the traffic flow. Besides, if one bridge is appealing to the eye, two will be doubly so.

“There’s something mystical about suspension bridges,” Rondon says. “They’re always moments in time. What is beautiful is not only their slender elegance but the incredibly simple technical solution. The towers are in compression, and the cables and the anchors in tension. That enhances their beauty.”

Despite this, the new bridge was the subject of six separate legal challenges. A major point of contention was the $3 toll, a rarity in Washington.

When Rondon moved to Gig Harbor, some of his new neighbors encouraged him to keep quiet about his job. His younger son, Gabriel, wasn’t sure he could tell his elementary school classmates what Dad did for a living.

Rondon decided the best solution was being forthright and accessible. He did a presentation at the school and hired a local woman as his public information officer. Erin Babbo has made so many house calls in some neighborhoods that Rondon calls her “the Avon lady.”

Everything is a potential flash point. Even the bones of Galloping Gertie must be treated with honor; the sunken bridge is now a historical monument.

“You have to respect the history it represents,” says Collins, who is in charge of design implementation. “You can’t simply come in here and build just another bridge.”

Rondon looks as if he might like to try. Gertie, he says, “is an historical monument to failure.”

The Venezuelan native is a relatively recent arrival at a company that boasts about how many employees -- 2,150 -- have been there at least 25 years. Rondon was finishing a suspension bridge in Portugal in the summer of 1999 when he took a call from a headhunter representing Bechtel. Did he want to build another bridge?

“This is a high-risk project,” Rondon says. “Bechtel must have thought, ‘How are we going to put this in the hands of someone who has never worked for the company?’ ”

The prospect didn’t seem to bother Bechtel, which will be paid $615 million for its work here. “We did a very detailed search,” says Tom Draeger, a Bechtel principal vice president.

Besides, he adds, Rondon learned the ways of Bechtel during the two years it took the bridge project to get off the ground. Much of that time Rondon spent in San Francisco. New employees call it “Bechtelization.”

The relationship between the managers in the field and “the head shed” is both tight and loose. “They get very involved in the contract, and they help you form a team,” says Rondon. “But once you’ve done that, they give you a high degree of freedom to perform your work.”

This project is stretching over a decade, but time is measured in minutes. If a meeting is supposed to begin at 9 a.m., everyone will be there at 8:59. (Should anyone be stupid enough to let his cell phone ring, there’s a $5 fine.) At lunch, when a waitress says she’ll delay putting in the orders until Rondon’s party is complete, he simply orders for the missing woman.

In the end, the disputes will be forgotten, the concrete mixing plant that is driving the neighbors crazy will be dismantled, and only the beauty will remain. That’s the hope, at least. If you work for Bechtel, you think you’re building a permanent piece of goodness.

“People go through life wanting to achieve something,” says Keeley O’Brien, a field engineer. “We’ll be helping 90,000 people get to work or home more safely and quicker.”

When the bridge workers are finished, they will disperse, moving on to other projects, maybe in another country.

“You work for Bechtel, you have to move,” says Tom Esselstrom, a longtime employee who is a manager on the bridge project. “Part of the premise of working for a construction company is that you’re working yourself out of a job.”

*

Bechtel’s headquarters is in an undistinguished 23-story building on the edge of San Francisco’s financial district. The Bechtel name is found nowhere on the front but must be sought on the side.

The name appears in another place as well, in a small private park next to the headquarters. In the middle of it is an ancient railroad car marked “WA Bechtel Co.”

Warren A. Bechtel began as a Kansas cattle farmer but quickly went broke. He migrated to the Oklahoma Territory in 1898, where he started grading railroad beds with a mule-drawn scraper. He moved to California, first building railroads, then highways, then pipelines.

In 1931, Bechtel was a prominent part of the successful $49-million bid to dam the Colorado River. The water and electricity from Hoover Dam served as catalysts for growth in the West. The dam is still the company’s signature achievement, the one that defines its self-image: risky, bold and innovative, backed up by skilled management and driving determination. It was also very profitable for Bechtel and the other builders.

It was Bechtel’s role as a defense contractor during World War II and then its expansion into the Middle East, building the 1,068-mile Trans-Arabian Pipeline, that ensured not only its continued prosperity but its transformation into an institution.

“Bechtel is one of the great creations of California in the 20th century, like Stanford University, like Kaiser Permanente, like Apple Computer,” says state historian Kevin Starr. “It’s part of the establishment, part of the way America organizes itself.”

The Bechtel family, whose net worth is estimated by Forbes magazine at $3.2 billion, continues to not only own but run the company.

“It’s very unusual for one company to have this kind of dynastic continuity,” says San Francisco historian Gray Brechin. “When you start getting a lot of descendants, they always squabble.”

After 134 years, the De Young family sold the San Francisco Chronicle. Even the Hearsts, who have retained their publishing empire, have ceded day-to-day control to professional managers.

“The Bechtel boys must be schooled early on in life that they have only one choice, and that’s to run the company,” says Brechin.

When Warren died in 1933, his son Steve took over. After running the company for nearly three decades, he ceded control to his son Steve Jr. in 1960. Steve Jr. had three daughters, two of whose husbands went to work for Bechtel, and two sons. Gary immediately went to work for the company while the younger boy, Riley, became a lawyer.

In 1981, at age 29, Riley too was lured into the fold. His first job was a contracts coordinator in a Michigan power plant.

“He was a mild-mannered fellow who didn’t give airs. He didn’t seem like he needed to take over the company one day,” says Mike O’Connell, a colleague from that era who now heads his own construction company. “He was one of the guys. One weekend we were coming home from golf and my van broke down. Instead of calling someone, which he easily could have done, he helped me fix it.”

In 1990, Riley became chief executive. Golf remains a passion: In February, he shot a hole-in-one on the 12th hole of Pebble Beach’s tough Spyglass Hill.

While members of the fifth generation have worked for the company, none are currently in prominent positions. Since Riley is only 51, the succession question is not yet urgent.

*

The first years of the Reagan administration were sweet for Bechtel. Revenue in 1981 hit a record $11.4 billion; in 1982, it jumped 20% to $13.6 billion. Bechtel President George P. Shultz resigned to become secretary of State. Vice President Caspar W. Weinberger left to be secretary of Defense. Former Vice President W. Kenneth Davis was deputy secretary of the Energy Department.

With such congenial folk running the country, the company appeared as powerful as one of its nuclear reactors. But a recession at home and falling oil prices in the Middle East cut sharply into new contracts.

Bechtel quickly slashed its rolls, cutting employment in half. “Pretty drastic,” conceded then-chief executive Stephen Jr.

A publicly traded company might not be as nimble -- or as brutal. But it saved Bechtel.

“If you look at the top 20 companies in our industry 20 years ago, most won’t be on the list anymore,” says Illich, who spent more than a decade in the field building pipelines before becoming an executive. “A lot of our competitors have gone under.”

In an interview in his San Francisco office, Illich tries to put Bechtel and Iraq in perspective. He draws a circle on a whiteboard, puts the figure of $3 trillion next to it. That’s the worldwide annual total for engineering, procurement and construction.

He cuts off a tiny slice with a red marker. That’s Bechtel’s revenues in 2002. After the trough of the late 1980s, when revenue fell below $5 billion, and the 1999 peak, when it hit $15.1 billion, Bechtel is back to where it was in 1981: $11.6 billion.

“Divide that by 100,” Illich instructs. That’s the number of big projects the company has going at any one time. The Iraq contract is merely one of those. “You can’t even see it,” he notes.

Most of the money from the Iraq contract will go to subcontractors hired by Bechtel. Illich holds up a paper clip, straightened to form a tiny line in the air. That’s all that will be left.

“Everyone says Iraq is a gravy train,” says Illich, snorting at the sheer wrongheadedness of such an assertion. “Everyone” includes many experts who believe that the government will have to appropriate billions more to get Iraq back on its feet, and that much of this, too, will flow to Bechtel.

But Illich says the truth is this: Even for Bechtel, nothing is a sure thing.

“In Indonesia, we were building infrastructure -- power plants, pipelines,” says Illich. “It was a fairly stable place, a sweet spot. Then in 1997 the Thai prime minister floated the baht, and everyone got the Asian flu. Indonesia imploded. Eight months later, it was gone. In Australia in the mid-’90s, we had several hundred employees. That dwindled to 31 as things dried up. Then there was the rebound. There are now a thousand. Our telecom division had 50 people in 1997. Eighteen months later it had 2,000. Telecom imploded, and now there are a thousand.”

Winning a contract is only half the battle. Many contracts have clauses that penalize the builder if the work isn’t completed on time. For the Tacoma bridge, the fines start at $12,500 a day and rise to a maximum of $45 million.

Those competitors who failed, Illich says, “weren’t able to execute.... They call us and say, ‘Can you buy us?’ We say, ‘No, you don’t fit our culture.’ They call a half-hour later and say, ‘How about 50 cents on the dollar?’ ”

*

The low-key attitude that Bechtel trumpets so much isn’t born out of feelings of inadequacy -- exactly the opposite: When you know you’re good, you don’t have to remind people every five minutes.

Unless your abilities or your record are called into question. That’s what happened at the beginning of the Iraq war, when Halliburton Co. won a secret government contract to put out oil wells torched by Saddam Hussein. The company attributed the award to its “proven track record.”

Halliburton said in its news release that its crews “brought 320 wells in Kuwait under control” in 1991.

There was considerable muttering at Bechtel over that sentence. Bechtel was the general contractor hired by the Kuwaiti government to douse the burning wells, which totaled 650. The company recruited, sustained and managed an international force of 10,000 engineers, technicians and support personnel.

Terry Farley, the now-retired Bechtel executive who had overseen the Kuwait effort, went public in the trade journal Engineering News Record, saying Halliburton “put out no fires -- zero.” Bechtel’s official corporate history doesn’t mention any Halliburton involvement in Kuwait.

Halliburton spokeswoman Wendy Hall says the company didn’t misrepresent its position. By saying the wells were brought “under control,” according to Hall, Halliburton didn’t mean to claim that it had extinguished the fires. “It’s just saying we have a history in this,” she says.

Farley is a legend in the business, the archetypal Bechtel employee who gave pep talks nicknamed “Eat Dirt and Die for Bechtel.” He won the Engineering News Record’s man of the year award in 1992 for his work in Kuwait.

The magazine recounted how, after an anti-tank device wounded six workers and blew up part of a building in a supposedly clean area, Farley walked across the zone to convince workers it was safe. The wells were extinguished months, if not years, earlier than forecast, at a savings to the Kuwaitis of more than $1 billion -- and considerable profit to Bechtel.

That was Bechtel’s hero culture in action. Now, executives say, work is more collaborative, more team-based.

The new style is exemplified by the Bechtel airport team, which works in cubicles on the 15th floor of the headquarters. The two dozen team members’ most recent project was an environmentally sensitive, $35-million terminal for the Caribbean island of Curacao.

Then Bechtel won the Iraq contract, which included restoring five airports.

“I’m trying to get some people together -- frankly, those whose wives will let them go,” Thomas Darmody, manager of aviation services, said on a recent morning. “We’ll do what needs to be done.” He pointed to senior planner James Brown. “He didn’t know two days ago we were going to ask him to go.”

Still, it probably wasn’t much of a surprise. Brown, 52, has worked for Bechtel in Costa Rica, Australia, Peru, England, Japan, Korea, Indonesia and various places in the U.S. Others on the aviation team can say the same. Darmody’s passport is the size of a brick, jammed full of extra pages to accommodate a multitude of visas.

“You get used to short-term decisions,” says Brown.

It’s permissible to beg off because of a personal conflict, but if you do it too often you’re probably at the wrong place.

“If you want to be a curb-and-gutter guy” -- the slightly derogatory term for those who go to an office and go home, every day -- “go work for a different company,” says Darmody. “You have to have a sense of adventure.”

And, as always at Bechtel, a sense of mission.

“We’re the best in the industry at disaster relief,” says Omran Assa, who does feasibility studies.

Is Assa, too, going to Iraq?

“No,” he says.

“Maybe,” says Darmody.