THE MAGNITUDE COMES HOME

Everybody’s been told that the gas pipeline will be a massive project of engineering and construction. All the presentations, with all the graphs and all the pie charts, and all the statistics, attempt to communicate what a massive project the pipeline will be. But my trip dragging my RV trailer to Juneau from Anchorage to have housing during the special session, brought the magnitude of the project home to me.

Part of my drive was the 297 miles from Tok, Alaska, to Haines Junction in Canada’s Yukon Territory – and that’s only a very small portion of the proposed pipeline route. Again, I don’t think I fully appreciated the magnitude of the gas pipeline project - or even the effort required to build just three feet of the pipeline -until I drove past the tundra, forest, rock, bog, rivers, mountains, and every other variety of terrain over which the pipeline will pass.