Aluminum Empire

In the wilds of northern British Colum bia last week, the touring Duke of Edinburgh was taken inside a 7,000-ft. mountain where a powerhouse bigger than a cathedral had been blasted out of the solid granite. Water from glacial lakes poured down through a ten-mile tunnel to turn the turbines and set in motion the vast Kitimat project built by the Aluminum Co. of Canada. "Does it work?" shouted the duke above the machines' roar. Said a proud Alcan engineer: "You bet it does."

As Philip watched, the $275 million Kitimat project,* which includes the world's biggest aluminum factory and the biggest power development ever built by private enterprise, went into operation for the first time. Power from a mountain generating station was cabled 50 miles overland to a new aluminum smelter on the site of the old Indian village of Kitimat. The alumina ore came in Alcan freighters from Jamaica through the Panama Canal to Kitimat's newly dredged harbor. In the Kitimat smelter, the power processed the alumina into the first 4O-lb. ingot of Kitimat aluminum. Now set to produce 180 million Ibs. of aluminum a year, Kitimat eventually can climb to a billion pounds as the market grows.

Man-Made Niagara. Three years, the labor of 10,000 men and the greatest force of construction machinery ever assembled in peacetime went into the building of Kitimat. The work was spread over an area bigger than the state of Massachusetts. Deep in the Canadian Rockies, 400 miles north of Vancouver, Alcan harnessed a chain of mountain lakes and eastward-flowing rivers by throwing one of the world's biggest dams -- a 317-ft. dike of rock and clay--across a canyon to create a great reservoir in the hills. Then Alcan drillers drove a ten-mile tunnel through the rock to sluice the water down the west side of the mountains. Falling 2,600 ft.--15 times the height of Niagara Falls--the water spins huge turbines in Alcan's underground powerhouse, and out of the powerhouse comes cheap, plentiful electricity, the indispensable requirement in the production of aluminum. At capacity, the mountain generating plant will produce 2,240,000 h.p., enough electricity to light and power New York City.

Model City. Now that the power plant is operating, the work center of the Alcan project will shift from the mountainous interior to the coast town of Kitimat. Already the town is bustling and crowded. Workers live in huts, or in a dormitory improvised from the old stern-wheeler Delta King, which used to ply the tourist trade out of San Francisco. Alcan has elaborate plans for a model city (600 houses by next spring), with schools, a shopping center, streets and parkways where now there is only bush and muskeg. The plans are based on the confident expectation that the capital of the world's newest aluminum empire will some day be a city of 50,000 people.

* For news of another project farther north, see BUSINESS.

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