COLLAPSE OF TEXAS TOWER NO. 4 213 



So with this past experience of marine work, when the Texas tower 

 program became a fact back in September of 1955, we thought we 

 would like to put a bid in for it. 



After all, the construction of these towers, to us, was a marine 

 problem. 



The only thing that we did not fully have experience on was the 

 jacks and the jacking assemblies and the actual jacking up of the 

 towers. 



Therefore, we associated ourselves with Morrison-Knudsen in Sep- 

 tember of 1955, because they had with them a man named Lucas, who 

 was a former partner of DeLong's for a number of years, and had 

 experience, a number of experiences, in jacking up the platforms. 



As you knovv, we submitted our proposal November 1, and it was 

 accepted in the latter part of November. 



Soon after that we started to order our materials under the priority 

 allocation that we had, but within a month or so this proved to be. inef- 

 fective. We had trouble getting materials or at least getting them on 

 order and getting them delivered in time to construct, which we had to 

 do under our contract, both towers in 1956. 



The first part of January of 1956 we brought this to the attention 

 of the Navy, and it was then decided instead of concentrating on two 

 towers and end up by not building either one that year, we should 

 concentrate our materials, our allocations, to one tower, and be able to 

 start one in the year. 



We decided to start Texas tower No. 3 first, so that at the completion 

 of this fabrication, which was done in Portland, Maine, we sailed on 

 August 7, 1956, to emplant Texas tower No. 3 some 65 miles south- 

 east of Nantucket. 



As you gentlemen may recall, this was only 3 days before what we 

 had been warned was the beginning of the hurricane season. 



We did this because of the fact that we were told it was most im- 

 portant to emplant these towers for the defense of our country. It 

 was part, of our early warning system. 



We got the tower out on site, and had it jacked up only 10 feet above 

 water when actually a hurricane came up the coast and, fortunately, 

 veered east of us and missed us by about 100 miles. 



You can well imagine what would have happened to the tower and 

 130 men we had aboard if it had continued on its original path. 



We completed the installation of Texas tower No. 3 in the winter of 

 1956 and, as I recall, it was actually — we actually removed our men 

 from the tower in March of 1957. 



At this time we concentrated our full effects or efforts on the con- 

 struction, fabrication, of Texas tower No. 4. 



This tower, being the first of its kind ever attempted, why, it was 

 quite a challenge engineeringwise and otherwise. 



We fabricated, continued fabricating, the tower in the spring of 

 1957, and in order to visualize what we had to contend with out on the 

 site, we actually built a model, a template which, I think, this com- 

 mittee saw last week in the motion pictures we had made. 



With this model we were able to visualize our problems in upending, 

 also in being able to tell how it would react during the upending and 

 we in turn made some changes to it, because of these experiences. 



Finally, in the latter part of June 1957, we sailed with the template 

 and platform for offshore New Jersey. 



