First oil flowing in trans-Alaska pipeline, June 1977

Images include workers and TV crews at Prudhoe Bay, Alaska, waiting for oil to start flowing into the trans-Alaska pipeline in June 1977. Film clips also include scenes inside a control room and aerial views of Prudhoe Bay facilities. According to filmmaker Bill Bacon in 2010: "This is the first time they put oil in the pipeline; They put a pig in the pipe first and in it was an electronic device that could detect where the oil was - you could walk along and hear the pig pinging and they had instruments that could pick it up to track it when it went underground." (Color/Silent/16mm film).
This sequence contains excerpts from AAF-20417 from the William W. Bacon III collection held by the Alaska Film Archives, a unit of the Alaska and Polar Regions Collections & Archives Department in the Elmer E. Rasmuson Library, University of Alaska Fairbanks. For more information please contact the Alaska Film Archives.
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