Big Inch Comes Through

Powerful cranes swung the two-ton pipe around, dropped it gently into a four-foot, slippery, clay ditch. Two welders banged their helmets down over their faces, descended into the ditch, self-conscious at doing their daily routine before 800 people. Their electric torches flared briefly, shooting a sizzling glare in the bright sunlight. The vital work done, short, rotund Interior Secretary Harold Le Clair Ickes stepped gingerly down into the pit, posed for the photographers. Big Inch was through.

The 12,282 citizens of Phoenixville, Pa. (four miles from Valley Forge) hadn't known such hoopla since the Revolution, when British soldiers pushed as far west as Phoenixville. The town is Big Inch's eastern junction; two pipelines, still uncompleted, will push their separate ways on to Philadelphia, 30 miles away, and Bayway, N.J., 92 miles.

Even as the last weld was made in Big Inch's main line, thick crude oil was oozing along its veins (24 in. in diameter) from Texas, up through Illinois, across Ohio. Built in one year, Big Inch burrows through eight states, tunnels under 20 rivers. Soon it will shoot 300,000 barrels of oil a day to the petroleum-thirsty East.

Less Gas, More Gasoline. The slow pulsing (three miles an hour) of the oil along Big Inch's 1,475-mile journey was the steadiest progress that the East's crucial gas & oil shortage made last week. In Washington, D.C., moves came quicker, but produced no oil. OPAdministrator Prentiss Brown prematurely announced that the pleasure-driving ban on Eastern motorists would be lifted "as soon as possible." Harold Ickes countered that Big Inch was chiefly a military supply line, would "give no more gasoline for pleasure driving." Representative Fred A. Hartley of New Jersey, chairman of an unofficial Congressional committee to speed oil to the northeast, took his committee into the White House to demand relief for Eastern motorists. Afterwards he cracked: "What we want from Washington is less gas and more gasoline."

At week's end, Ickes' office gave Easterners their first clear oil painting of the future. Fuel-oil users will get "at least" as much oil to heat their homes as last winter, possibly more. Gas-starved Eastern motorists will get relief, too. Now that tank cars can be freed from the Eastern haul, gas & oil supplies can be equalized from the Rockies to the Atlantic. Eastern A-card holders will probably have their gas allowances upped from one and a half to two or three gallons a week, to use as they please; Midwest motorists will probably be cut from four gallons to the same figure, thus sharing the shortage.

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