214 UTAH INTERNATIONAL: A BIOGRAPHY OF A BUSINESS In 1961 Utah Construction and Engineering Proprietary, Ltd., obtained a huge $47 million contract for a joint venture with Brown and Root to build another massive portion of the Snowy Mountains project. This venture involved building more than eighteen miles of horseshoe-section tunnel (twenty feet high and twenty-one feet wide), five shafts totaling nineteen hundred feet in length, one mile of ninety-six-inch aqueduct with two small dams, and the Island Bend Dam, a curved concrete gravity structure that would divert the Snowy River by tunnel into Lake Eucumbene. The men worked within sight of 7,314-foot Mount Kosciusko, Australia’s highest peak, and unusually severe weather plagued the project much of the year. Despite this, hole-through on the Eucumbene-Snowy Tunnel was achieved in June 1964, after driving a record breaking 2,600 feet per month; and the hole-through on the Snowy-Geehi Tunnel to the Murray came by the year’s end. The Australian Federation of Civil Engineering Contractors recognized these accomplishments with its 1964 Australian Construction Achievement Award. In addition, the combine successfully bid on constructing the Jindabyne Dam, the Blowering Dam, and the $3.4 million By Utah joined two local construction firms in building the Manapouri Power Project for the New Zealand Ministry of Works. Here, Vice President Weston Bourret celebrates seven years’ labor.