Pipeline

September 4, 1960: "Dozens of flatcars, each heaped high with 11 sections of steel pipe 40 feet long and a yard across, are being shunted now onto railroad sidings at Sprague River.

There the pipe is being stockpiled into a tremendous mountain of steel -- more than 800 carloads before the job is completed.

The stockpile represents the first tangible evidence of a 1,400-mile natural gas pipeline from northern Alberta, in Canada, to Antioch, in the San Francisco Bay area. It will run the length of Klamath County.

The line will cost 328 million dollars before it is completed, probably in the early winter of 1961-62.

For Klamath County, the line means two things. It means jobs for several hundred construction workers -- not now, but soon; it means natural gas service, probably about the time the big line is finished.

Sprague River seems an unlikely place for such a flurry of activity as it now is accommodating. It has become what pipeline planners call a pipe yard and assembly point. There stockpiled pipe will be 'double-ended,' or welded into double, 80 foot sections. They'll be wrapped with a protective compound and hauled by truck to the right-of-way for laying into the ground.

The Sprague River yard will accommodate 72 miles of pipe. Another yard has been established at Gilchrist, where 84 miles of pipe will be stockpiled." (Herald and News)

February 10, 1961: "An electrical generator blew up Thursday at the Stanley-Bledsoe Corp. pipeline yard and company officials and the Klamath County sheriff's office said the apparent cause was dynamiting." (Herald and News)