Pasadena Firm Looks to Destroy Weapons, Then Help Rebuild Iraq
War may be hell, but its aftermath can be plenty lucrative.
Just ask Pasadena-based Parsons Corp. The engineering and design firm is rebuilding roads, schools and hospitals in Bosnia and Kosovo. It is dismantling chemical weapons plants and SS-20 missile delivery systems in Russia. And it has its eye on Iraq, eager to help resurrect that country's infrastructure after Saddam Hussein's regime leaves power -- by one means or another.
In fact, Parsons could be among the first U.S. companies to go into Iraq because of the expertise it has in neutralizing and eliminating chemical and other weapons. It has been undertaking such tasks for more than 20 years as part of the U.S. government's Cooperative Threat Reduction program.
Parsons has another edge when it comes to Iraq, as well: A branch of the company built the Baghdad subway in the early 1980s.
"The subway was never finished," recalls James Shappell, head of Parsons' transportation division. (The company, not surprisingly, doesn't have the blueprints for the underground system in its files anymore; U.S. officials came in and snatched up those renderings during the Persian Gulf War.)
Parsons, of course, is not totally focused on war-torn reaches of the world. Closer to home, it is expanding the Seattle-Tacoma airport and refurbishing New York's Williamsburg bridge.
Overall, Parsons today enjoys a bigger backlog of projects than ever. The firm, which is controlled by an Employee Stock Ownership Plan representing the holdings of 12,000 workers, boasts about $1.7 billion in annual sales.
Yet for Parsons -- as well as other California-based engineering giants such as Bechtel Corp. of San Francisco, Fluor Corp. of Aliso Viejo and AECom Inc. of Los Angeles -- volatile regions such as the Middle East hold particular promise.
"The buildup of the aerospace and defense industry after World War II is a big reason" so many industry leaders are clustered in California, says James McNulty, chairman of Parsons, which diversified from oil- and gas-related work to military projects when it built silos for the Minuteman missile in the 1950s.
Parsons' weapons-destruction work, meanwhile, began in 1980 with a Pentagon plan to destroy its nerve gas and other chemical weapons by burning them in incinerators on Johnston Atoll, a military installation in the South Pacific.
