Regional Development and New Opportunities
The creation of Petrobras in 1953 and Sudene in 1959, opened the way for Odebrecht’s growth in Bahia and the Northeast

After shutting down Saici, Construtora Norberto Odebrecht went through a decisive period in its history. The company won new contracts, including highly complex projects. However, to ensure its immediate survival, it had to keep a large number of small projects going at once. Southeastern Brazilian contractors followed a different operating procedure in those days. Because they built large projects one at a time, they could centralize their operations. But Odebrecht preferred to apply and improve on the concepts of decentralization, planned delegation and partnership, principles that would become ever more firmly established over the course of the company’s history.

From the beginning, the core of this philosophy has been the Individual. The possibility of earning overtime was almost unheard of in Salvador back then, but routine at Construtora Norberto Odebrecht, providing and added incentive for the workers. When they had to travel to far from home, the company looked after the families they left behind. The workers could leave with the assurance that their wives and children were in good hands. Norberto devoted tremendous attention to his team members’ personal lives. “Leave it to me. I’ll take care of it,” he would say, because he knew that no one could do their work properly if they were worried about their families. “Go take care of business, and leave your problems to me,” he would add.

The more experienced workers were joined by a group of talented young people with a strong desire to learn and develop. Years later, some of them, such as Benedito Luz, Henrique Browne Ribeiro, Nilo Simões Pedreira, Piero Marianetti, Roberto Campos and Walter Caymmi Gomes, would play a decisive role in the company’s growth. They had the help of Emílio Odebrecht, Norberto’s father, who had returned to the company as a structural engineer and passed on his vast business experience to the younger entrepreneurs.

Business kept coming in. In 1953 and 1954, the highlights were a reinforced-concrete cocoa warehouse for F. Stevenson & Co. in Itabuna; the expansion of the Cia. de Cigarros Souza Cruz cigarette factory, and a 132-m long, 19-m high bridge/dam on the Joanes River in Salvador; and the port of Canavieiras, where the company built a 400-meter quay.

Around that time, Construtora Norberto Odebrecht also gained a new client, Petrobras, which was created in October 1953. However, the seeds of the state-owned oil company were sown long before. Oscar Cordeiro, President of the Bahia Commodities Exchange, and agronomist Manuel Inácio Barros had found “black gold in Lobato, on the outskirts of Salvador, as early as 1931. They rightly concluded that the black mud local residents used to light their lamps was actually petroleum.

“Real oil!” Exclamation mark and all, this was the headline of the Estado da Bahia newspaper on January 23, 1939. A reporter had gone out to Lobato and seen “A black liquid floating on a rain puddle” next to a drill. Two days earlier, on a Saturday, Cordeiro had been there and experienced, in his words, “The most amazing feeling in my life.” The workers had ended their day’s drilling at well number 163 after reaching a depth of 214 meters. Cordeiro saw "Oil seeping from the mouth of the well and running along the ground towards the railway bed.” The myth that there was no oil in Brazil had been debunked for good.

From the very start, Norberto Odebrecht joined forces with what would become Brazil’s largest company. At first, his company built support facilities for Petrobras teams in the municipality of Candeias. Later came water treatment plants, offshore platforms, bridges, canals, dams, warehouses, power houses, dredging services, labs, housing, clubs, workshops and roads, among others, in every part of the country. Some of these projects were challenging in terms of construction engineering, requiring expertise, creativity and vast experience. The relationship between Odebrecht and Petrobras has been firmly established over the course of five decades, and produced decisive results for the budding Brazilian oil industry.

It all began with a problem that needed solving. In 1953, Norberto Odebrecht Construtora was helping build the Catu-Candeias pipeline, which would convey oil from the new Catu field to the refinery in Mataripe. Newly expanded to handle the new wells’ output, Mataripe began refining nearly 5,000 barrels daily. As of 1957, however, it had to be expanded again to increase its capacity ten times. The problem was the local soil, which was the kind that turns into sticky swamps and mud, bogging down people, vehicles and equipment. The contractor surmounted the challenge by building a 120-meter dock in the heart of a mangrove marsh in mud up to 9 meters deep.

If drilling for oil onshore was hard work, the challenges of offshore drilling were even greater. Financial and technological resources were scarce, but the company had a handful of brave men that made it a pioneer in this kind of work. All they had to work with was sailboats carrying piledrivers – improvised, floating equipment that the workers handled masterfully. “On stormy nights the boats would get lost, and the only way for them to communicate with the platforms was by signaling with kerosene lamps,” recalls Norberto. More than ever, creative work was key. One of the most outstanding examples was welding large steel tanks together to make the flat floats used to help install fixed offshore platforms in the Dom João field in 1958 and 1961. The platforms were built with reinforced concrete and the bottom ten meters were made from steel piles that were later filled in with concrete.

The creation of Petrobras gave an unprecedented boost to Bahia’s industrial construction market

Over the course of nearly 50 years, the total joint trajectory of Odebrecht and Petrobras has included the construction and installation of refineries and platforms, roads, buildings, ports and the drilling of 140 offshore oil wells. Petrobras had consultants from international companies and engineers and modern technical and management procedure made a major contribution to the advancement of both companies. Odebrecht built Brazil’s first synthetic rubber factory, owned by Companhia Pernambucana de Borracha Sintética (Coperbo), a Petrobras subsidiary, 1962 and 1965, the year that it installed natural gas plants for the oil company in Catu, Mataripe and Madre de Deus, Bahia.

The most visible symbol of the partnership between Odebrecht and Petrobras became part of the Rio de Janeiro landscape in 1969. The contracting company built the 120,000 square meter, 117-meter-high, 27-story Petrobras Building in record time – just 36 months. Back then, it was the largest monolithic structure in Latin America. This project qualified Construtora Norberto Odebrecht to build a 28,000 square-meter underground parking facility with 1,200 spaces, as well as Praça Pública square, the Santa Teresa streetcar station, and access ramps and development for the Santo Antônio esplanade.

The two companies had begun their relationship at a very special time in Brazilian history. After the dramatic ending of the Vargas era in August 1954, when the Brazilian President shot himself “To leave this life with dignity and go into History,” as he wrote in his suicide letter and testament, the country was eager for change.

Brazil began to get its wish two years later, when the next president, Juscelino Kubitschek, took office on January 31, 1956. Brazil would not only move full steam ahead but advance fifty years in five. This was the ambitious, optimistic and audacious motto of the JK administration. Its two-word slogan was “energy and transportation.” At the age of 54, the president had a forceful image, with a will to work and optimism such as the country had not seen in years. He made many plans aimed to developing Brazil at an accelerated rate. One was the Goals Plan.

Some targets were reached and others were not. A country that had just 3.1 million kilowatts of installed power in 1956 was generating over 5 million in 1960, which was less than originally planned. However, the goal of building 12,000 kilometers of new roads was surpassed. The total actually constructed reached 13,000 kilometers.

One milestone for Norberto Odebrecht Construtora during that period was building the Castro Alves Theater in Salvador. It was such a long-held dream for Bahia society that in 1948 Congressman Berbert de Castro complained, “It is truly regrettable that well into the 20th century, when we are about to begin gala celebrations of the fourth centennial of its foundation, old and historic Salvador, Brazil’s first city for so many and magnificent reasons, should still feel the need for a theater that can match its magnificent forums for culture and spirituality.”

The project was carried out nine years later, when Antonio Balbino was Governor of Bahia. Designed by architects Bina Fonyat and Humberto Lopes, it amazed the Bahia public, which had expected a traditional building similar to the municipal theaters of Rio de Janeiro and São Paulo. It was controversial at the time, but the success of the design was underscored when it won honorable mention at the First Theater Arts Biennial of in São Paulo. It delights the visiting public to this day.

In June 1957, Governor Balbino told Odebrecht that he wanted the work done quickly. The contractor had to make changes in the original design when its engineers found some failings, such as a lack of collective dressing rooms, wardrobes and an appropriate area for the ballet company to rehearse, and problems with the scene-changing system. Nevertheless, the Catsro Alves Theater was built in eleven months, with 1,700 seats in the main theater, and another 4,000 in the open-air amphitheater called the Acoustic Shell (the municipal theaters of Rio and São Paulo, much larger cities than Salvador, had 1,800 and 1,600 seats, respectively).

Once it had been officially delivered to the State of Bahia on July 2, 1958, the state’s independence day, the theater was open to public visitation. However, its first show, a performance by the Rio de Janeiro Municipal Theater Ballet Company scheduled for July 14, never took place. Five days earlier, a fire gutted the main building, leaving nothing but the amphitheater intact. The governor left his nearby mansion before dawn to witness the destruction of his project, and wept at the sight. The theater would only open in 1967.

The Brazilian scene in the 1960s was vibrant with optimism and euphoria. In 1959, Odebrecht sponsored its first cultural work, titled Homage to Historic Bahia, and in 1965 the company created the Odebrecht Foundation. The northeastern part of the country was also experiencing a phase of expansion and progress driven by the creation of Sudene, a regional development agency based in the city of Recife, where Odebrecht opened a branch office in 1962. From there, the contracting company began coordinating a large number of projects in the Northeast and North. Previously, Odebrecht’s teams had built several projects: Cia. Empório Industrial do Norte, which housed the powerhouse and foundations for boilers and turbines of the Luís Tarquínio Textile Mill; a reinforced-concrete warehouse for Empresas Reunidas Correa Ribeiro; the expansion of the Moinho da Bahia flour mill, and construction of the Sanbra – Sociedade Algodeira do Nordeste Brasileiro cotton mill complex. All these projects were built in Salvador between 1956 and 1957.

In the Northeast, the company was responsible for building an assembly plant and storage facility for Willys Overland and industrial complexes for Coperbo, Alpargatas Confecções, and Tintas Coral do Nordeste in the state of Pernambuco, as well as other projects for Brazilian and international organizations that were arriving in the region.

In the 60s, the Northeast was highly optimistic and experienced a phase of expansion due to the creation of the Sudene development agency

The contractor’s projects multiplied, and Odebrecht was responsible for introducing numerous methods and types of equipment to the Northeast that are now routinely used. For example, Construtora Norberto Odebrecht owned the first crane used on a construction site, which was a considerable advance over metal elevators. The company also boldly incorporated large-diameter bored piles and lever beams into its projects, and revolutionized the region’s civil construction technology with the intensive use of prestressed concrete.

One of the company’s first projects involving precast concrete in Bahia was the Funil Bridge. Built in 1968, it connects Itaparica Island in Todos os Santos Bay with the mainland. This span is an example of the options Odebrecht’s clients were offered to provide more creative and economic ways of building projects. Lacking the equipment to hoist heavy weights, workers began inventing work tools and moving giant parts with hydraulic jacks that were only slightly larger than a car jack. The bridge was supposed to be built using the traditional method, with shoring for the concrete. This involved building a wooden bridge first and then a concrete span over it, after which the wooden structure was removed – a method that doubled construction costs. The contractor decided to use pre-cast concrete instead, because it was a less expensive method. Despite the strong current in the channel between the island and the mainland, which made the work more difficult, the company’s teams built a 660-meter long bridge standing on foundations made from large-diameter compressed-air piles driven up to 25 meters deep.

Odebrecht’s experience in the 1960s bolstered its expertise in two areas that were key to its growth as a national company. First, it mastered the construction of large-scale projects. Two good examples are the Pedras Dam on the Contas River, which is 408 meters long and nearly 70 meters high, requiring over 300,000 cubic meters of concrete, and the 832-meter-long Propriá-Colégio road/rail bridge across the São Francisco River, whose deep foundations required driving large-diameter piles directly into rock at water depths of up to 70 meters.

Most important, however, Odebrecht had acquired the managerial expertise to carry out logistically complex projects involving large numbers of people and massive quantities of materials. This new skill, allied with an entrepreneurial philosophy that was increasingly consolidated and disseminated among the company’s teams, was the passport with which the company arrived in the Southeast of Brazil at the end of the decade.

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