125 Years Strong – An IUOE History

INTERNATIONAL UNION OF OPERATING ENGINEERS
Following the 1956 collapse of two-thirds of
the outdated Schoellkopf Power Plant into the
Niagara River, the loss of the generating station
prompted the U.S. Congress the next year to pass
the Niagara Redevelopment Act, which granted
the New York Power Authority (N.Y.P.A.)
a federal license to develop a hydroelectricproducing
plant on the United States’ share of
the Niagara River. The next year, the N.Y.P.A.
began building the nearly $800-million Niagara
Power Project, on which I.U.O.E. operating
engineers worked from the beginning until it
was fully completed in 1963.
Niagara Falls, New York, Local No. 463
supplied more than 400 members and hosted
more than 1,000 additional operating engineers
from locals across the country over the lifespan
of the project to fulfill its large manpower
needs, which included construction of the
Robert Moses Niagara Hydroelectric Power
Station, the Lewiston Pump Generating Plant
and a man-made, 1,900-acre reservoir. The
Niagara Power Project opened in 1961 as the
largest hydropower facility in the Western
world, with a combined 25 turbines spun by
748,000 gallons of water per second, according
to the N.Y.P.A. (Decades later in 2021, Robert
Equipment used by members of I.U.O.E. Local No. 4 in Boston on construction of the city’s Dewey Square Tunnel, which would
route Interstate 93 under the city’s financial district. (Photo courtesy of the Boston Public Library, Leslie Jones Collection.)
jurisdictions of the participating unions.
To help achieve its mission, the committee
established area committees and a National
Education and Information Bureau to gather
data and provide information to the unions.
With a membership of more than 241,000
in 1955 and the union having greatly
expanded its services to its increasing number
of locals throughout the recent years, the
I.U.O.E. international headquarters in the old
Carpenters Building in Washington, D.C.,
was “bursting at the seams,” as an essay in the
June 1956 International Operating Engineer
described it. To ease its growing pains,
the I.U.O.E. decided to construct its own
international office building in the heart of the
nation’s capital, and in April 1955, the union
broke ground for the nearly $2.2-million
facility at 1125 17 th Street, Northwest, which
would be opened two years later.
Meanwhile, in 1956 the I.U.O.E. established
its General Pension Plan for officers and
staff of its locals, benefitting thousands of
individuals immediately and over the union’s
ensuing decades.
That year, the federal government established
the Highway Trust Fund to provide a
more dependable source of funding for the
construction of the U.S. Interstate Highway
System. In financing the highway system and
certain other roads, the fund helped create
thousands of jobs for operating engineers well
into the future.
Members of I.U.O.E. Local No. 463 in Niagara Falls, New York, help build the Robert Moses Niagara
Hydroelectric Power Station on the Niagara River during 1960 and 1961 as part of the $800 million Niagara
Power Project that began in 1957. (Local 463 was merged into Local No. 17 of Buffalo in May 2019.)
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