Global Engineers

Into the residence of Burma's Prime Minister Thakin Nu last week walked an American construction engineer with a plan to remake Burma. The engineer was ex-Colonel H. B. Pettit of Warrenton, Va., manager of southeast Asia for Manhattan's Knappen-Tippetts-Abbett-McCarthy, an engineering firm that is now planning and designing foreign-building projects in more countries (15) than any other U.S. firm. Two years ago Burma used $2,000,000 of Point Four aid plus $1,000,000 of its own to hire the engineers to study the Burmese economy and draft ways of enlarging it.

The engineers' plan calls for huge irrigation and drainage projects for Burmese rivers, for hydroelectric plants, for railway and highway networks, for opening up undeveloped mineral wealth, and for building big, new port facilities. In addition, it includes the establishment of a number of new industries (basic chemicals, plastics, bamboo pulp and paper), and the modernization of others. All told, the projects call for the spending of $1.5 billion, two-thirds of which Burma's government thinks it can raise to lift the whole nation's productive capacity by 50% in a decade. The rest of the money will be sought from private-risk capital.

World's Work. Such vast projects are all in the day's work for Knappen-Tip-petts-Abbett-McCarthy. The firm spends $500,000 a year on travel alone, and each of its five partners travels an average of 75,000 to 100,000 miles. The firm employs 420 to 450 U.S. engineers at home & abroad plus another 200 foreign engineers. In the past five years alone it has engineered projects totaling more than $3 billion, half of them overseas. Right now it is working on close to $1 billion worth of new projects:

P: Korea: a $130 million United Nations rehabilitation program.

P: Turkey: the $67 million hydro-irrigation-flood control program at the Seyhan Dam.

P: Puerto Rico: an $8,000,000 international airport.

P: Israel: a $3,000,000 wharf project at Haifa.

P: Bolivia: a $30 million, 300-mile highway over rugged mountains.

P: Venezuela: $30 million terminal facilities and other heavy construction at Puerto Ordaz for Orinoco Mining Co.

P: Colombia: a $35 million hydroelectric project on the Campoalegre River.

P: Cuba: engineering surveys of a $10 million hydroelectric plant near Cienfuegos, the island's first.

P: Haiti: a $40 million Artibonite River development.

P: Portugal: a $130 million hydroelectric development on the Douro River.

P: Greece: $133 million of projects ranging from dams, irrigation works and five small hydroelectric plants to rehabilitation of the Piraeus port facilities.

P: Libya: the $58 million U.S. Air Force base at Tripoli.

Army Hands. The partnership had its beginnings in work with the U.S. Army Engineers. Founder of the firm, the late Theodore Knappen, was a West Pointer who worked as an engineer with the Army's flood-control project on Ohio's Muskingum River in 1935. Working with him were two other civilian engineers, Ernest Tippetts and Gerald McCarthy, who later joined his private firm with Robert Abbett. An ex-Army engineer, Brigadier General James H. Stratton, Knappen's West Point classmate, came in two years before Knappen's death in 1951. Their work is scattered so far that they divide up the world among them. Tippetts looks after North Africa, Abbett the Near East and Bolivia; McCarthy watches Haiti, Burma, Puerto Rico, Portugal and Greece; General Stratton supervises Turkey, Colombia and Cuba. The fifth partner, William Lidicker, looks after Israel plus the U.S. projects, which comprise about 50% of their work.

The Burma project is no more ambitious than one the partners are already developing in Iraq. On the legendary site of the Garden of Eden, they are engineering a $555 million project to reclaim the Tigris-Euphrates valley from its encrusted alkalis, make it bloom with crops enough to feed the entire population of 5,000,000. Their ditches are following the course of those put down by another Army engineer, Alexander the Great. "He picked so well," says Near East Boss Abbett, "we found we could not improve on it."

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