The Alaska Pipeline (American Experience)

After a decade-long search for oil in Alaska's wilderness, gas burst up out of an exploratory well on the North Slope. It was soon calculated that as much as ten billion barrels of oil lay below the frozen tundra of Prudhoe Bay. For over three years, workers battled brutal Arctic weather to construct an eight hundred mile pipeline. The men, machines and money the pipeline brought to Alaska would forever transform America's last great wilderness.