Dream Come True

Near a sandy beach in the Concepcion suburb of San Vicente, Chilean and U.S. engineers and technicians were working last week to make a 20-year-old Chilean dream come true. Two years ago, San Vicente had been a peaceful fishing village sought out by tourists for its seascapes and broad vistas of green forest stretching to the banks of Chile's largest river, the Bio-Bio.

Now, where fishermen's cottages had stood, workmen were building the blast furnace and rolling mills of Huachipato, the No. 2 steel plant in Latin America (No. 1: Brazil's Volta Redonda). Where fishermen had spread their nets to dry, there was an 890-ft. dock. Modern brick houses for 4,000 workers were springing up in a planned industrial city which Chileans proudly compared to Oak Ridge.

Cats & Rats. A project of the Chilean government's Corporacion de Fomento de la Produccion (Development Corporation), Huachipato will be the west coast's first completely integrated steel plant. Under construction since early 1947, the $83 million plant is being financed by Export-Import Bank loans totaling $48 million, by stock sales to Fomento and private Chilean interests, and by credits from U.S. firms (e.g., Pittsburgh's Koppers Co., Inc.), which are supplying equipment and technical know-how.

Chile's mountain riches will supply the raw materials: ore from Bethlehem's El Tofo mines, 500 miles up the coast; coal from the undersea veins of nearby Lota; power from Fomento's hydroelectric plant at neighboring El Abanico. Only limestone has been a problem. To get it, a crew of 130 men, with rat-hungry cats, is now setting up installations on rainy, rat-infested Madre de Dios Island, 900 miles down the coast.

A Shot in the Arm. Huachipato's pig-iron capacity of 205,000 metric tons makes it only half as big as Volta Redonda, and tiny by Pittsburgh standards. But the 235,000 tons of steel it is expected to turn out each year when full production is reached will make Chile virtually self-sufficient in steel.

Besides giving impetus to new mining, metalworking and fabricating industries, Huachipato will save Chile some $15 million a year in foreign exchange formerly spent on steel in the U.S. Said Huachipato's General Manager Desiderio Garcia: "This is the beginning of Chile's real industrial revolution."

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