The Waterbury Democrat., 1945-11-14
During Emergency

The Big men ana LlJtle lncH pipe lines, which delivered more than 8 quarter billion barrels of oil and petroleum products to our east coast from remote fields and refineries, constituted a huge, double-barreled gun pointed at Ger many during the last year before surrender, members of the Connec- ticut Section of the American h. stitute of Electrical Engineers were told here tonight. The meeting was held in the Conn. Light & Power Company's auditorium.
 Reviewing the yeoman service rendered by the famed twin arteries toward winning the war. Merritt A. Hyde, Jr., expert on pipe line power service with the Westing- house Electric Corporation who helped establish electrical control systems for both projects, stressed the vital role proper identification played in that achievement.
 The 24-inch crude oil line-Big Inch-is 1,400-mile conduit whose underground route encounters all varieties of terrain ranging from the Mississippi bottoms to the ridges of the Alleghenies,' he said. Operating at capacity, the line carries four million barrels of oil continuously, weighing 100000 tons and moving at more than four miles an hour. To accomplish this re- quires a total propelling force of obout 4,000 tons and calls for the expenditure of nearly 100000 horse power-one of mans greatest pump ing jobs
 130,0O0 Horsepower Installed
 The task is performed by elec- trically-driven centrifugal pumps, the speaker explained. Approx imately 10000 horsepower, in 30 units of 1.500 horsepower each, is installed in 26 stations along the route. Spare and auxiliary units bring the total installed horsepow- CT to 130,000.
 An installation of that size is in itself unusual" MT. Hyde pointed out. Tt would tax the full capacity of TWAS Norris Dam generating station. But the real interest in the Big Inch is not its size, but lies in the nature of its operation. It is one thing to build a 130,000 horsepower pumping plant on @ particular site-quite another mat ter to set up the same total capacity in 26 separate stations performing a single pumping operation, yet ex- tended over l 400 miles of terrain"
 Touching upon some of the com- plexities engineers had to face in the Big Inch identification, the engineer disclosed that the whole character of pipe line operation stems from subdivision into stations separated geographically but joined physically.
 The problem became more com plicated," he continued, because the stations had to be irregularly spaced because of uphill and down. hill ground, their sites being de- termined almost solely by the hy- draulics of the pipe line. Beyond that difficulty, a wide range of pow CT service conditions were en- countered since, in the case of Big Inch, Is different utility companies delivered power to the stations. That meant a variety of service Voltages."
 Problems Confronted
 MT. Hyde described the methods and equipment utilized to overcome these and other problems, and the even more trying ones met with in electrifying the Little Big Inch. Its loads of refined petroleum prod ucts called for still greater preci- sion in station control to hold con- tamination between products to a minimum.
 He explained that continuous in=