Amazing Pipeline Stories

In the 1970s, the world's largest construction companies invaded Alaska in a wild rush to build the 800-mile $8 billion trans-Alaska pipeline. Workers by the tens of thousands headed north, hoping to make their fortunes working on the pipeline, in a stampede that dramatically affected Alaska. With the avalanche of big money and new arrivals came new problems: drugs, prostitution, gambling, and violent crime. Rapid economic and social changes ultimately touched the lives of virtually every Alaskan. Nearly a quarter-century later, Fairbanks journalist Dermot Cole recalls the best of the pipeline stories with humor, authenticity, and drama.

Dermot Cole is a long-time newspaper columnist for the Fairbanks Daily News-Miner. Cole grew up in Pennsylvania and lived in Taiwan, Hong Kong, and Montana before moving to Alaska at the start of the pipeline boom. He studied journalism at the University of Alaska Fairbanks and was named a Michigan Journalism Fellow in 1986-87 at the University of Michigan. He also worked for the Associated Press in Seattle. Cole is the author of Frank Barr, Bush Pilot in Alaska and the Yukon; Hard Driving: The 1908 Auto Race from New York to Paris; and North to the Future: The Alaska Story 1959-2009.