Chiefs Choice

Many moons ago, when a tribe of Haida Indians was searching for a new camp site, a famed chief named Jumping Brook led the way to Kitimat, a coastal flatland in the rugged northwest portion of what is now British Columbia. Two aspects of the Kitimat site appealed to Chief Jumping Brook. It was near the sea (the Haidas built ocean-going canoes), and there was plenty of fresh water in the chain of lakes and rivers a short distance inland.

Last week, some 400 years after Jumping Brook's time, the Aluminum Co. of Canada, Ltd. followed the chief's reasoning in putting Kitimat at the center of a vast new West Coast industrial project. Alcan signed an agreement with the British Columbia government on water rights for a $500 million power development and aluminum plant in the Kitimat area.

Market Needed. Kitimat's position will enable Alcan to bring in bauxite and other raw materials by sea, and to ship out the finished aluminum. The nearby network of lakes and rivers will be dammed to form a 500-sq.-mi inland sea. Its waters will be drained off into two ten-mile tunnels through the mountains to produce an estimated 1,600,000 horsepower of cheap electricity for the Kitimat factory.

The agreement with British Columbia is only the first in a series of conditions that must be met before Alcan can get to work on the Kitimat plans. The agreement, under which the company will pay the province a fee (as yet undisclosed) for the water rights,, still has to be approved by the B.C. legislature. And Alcan must also have some assurance of a steady market for the aluminum that Kitimat will produce. That market will depend mainly on the outcome of Washington negotiations (TIME, Dec. 25), in which Alcan hopes to get a U.S. defense order that will guarantee the sale of a big chunk of Kitimat's future output.

Power Wanted. Although it is already the world's biggest single aluminum producer, Alcan is strained to the limit to fill current orders from its big plants in Quebec's Saguenay Valley. Because of its cheap power supply, Alcan's prices are the world's lowest. The company's 1950 output of 378,000 tons was easily sold, and Britain has already contracted to buy nearly all the extra production the company can draw from its Quebec pot lines in the next three years. Said an Alcan official: "We're sold out unless we build some more powerhouses."

The Kitimat project will be the most ambitious undertaking Alcan has tackled in the 48 years since the company was established in Canada. It will take five years to complete and will require more capital than Alcan's current total assets of $462 million. When finished, Kitimat will add 500,000 tons a year to Alcan's output.

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