Under direction of a corps of American engineers, construction of the $20,000,000 oil refinery on the outskirts of Haifa is well under way. An army of 1,100 workers, 60 per cent Arabs and 40 per cent Jews, has cleared and fenced in the 360-acre site and is constructing roads, drainage, temporary buildings, a railway bridge across the Kishon river connecting with Haifa Port and an automobile bridge from the Haifa Acre road. The total number of men employed is soon expected to rise to 3,000.
The strictest guard is maintained around the site, and utmost secrecy prevails as to the work. The fences are patrolled and a day and night guard is maintained in four watchtowers equipped with powerful searchlights. The refinery is being built by an English corporation, Consolidated Refineries, Ltd. It will have a capacity of 2,000,000 tons of crude oil a year, drawing on the supply brought to Haifa from Iraq by the pipeline of the Iraq Petroleum Co. The Consolidated is a joint firm, in which the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company and the Anglo-Saxon Oil Company are joint partners.
The plant will be in two parts, the refinery proper and a tank farm, separated by a broad road. The machinery for the refinery is almost all being imported from the United States as well as construction and excavation machinery. The refinery is located on a site obtained in a trade with the American-Palestine Economic Corporation, originally the oil interests purchased land for the plant on the sand dunes along the shore of Haifa Bay. The American-Palestine firm, which has been responsible for much of the industrial and residential development in the Haifa Bay area, feared that this location would result in pollution of the air and water of the Bayside development and of Haifa itself, and offered to exchange it for the present site, an offer accepted by the oil companies.
Aside from the direct benefit of employment of thousands of workers, the plant is expected to bring other advantages. A number of local industries have received orders for some of the materials used in construction. The Palestine Electric Corporation is supplying power. Development of roads and bridges will benefit the entire area. Simultaneously with these developments, the Government has started construction of a long-sought road connecting Haifa directly with its airport across the Kishon river, and greatly reducing the time required for getting from the city to the bay-side suburbs.
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The Archive of the Jewish Telegraphic Agency includes articles published from 1923 to 2008. Archive stories reflect the journalistic standards and practices of the time they were published.
