There are few places anywhere on earth as physically and psychologically different as Orange County and Aceh, the tsunami-devastated northernmost prov-ince of Sumatra.
OC is rich and modern, Aceh is poor and backward. OC is a land of big cars, big houses, big egos.
Aceh is a place of mangrove swamps, rainforest,and kids with matchstick limbs who grow up, at the best of times, in the grip of hunger and disease.
Yet Aceh felt the grip of OC more strongly than anywhere else in Sumatra long before the tsunami struck.
As the U.S. Navy concentrates its rescue operations on this devastated region where 90,000 fellow human beings have perished, it’s worth telling the inspiring story of a couple from Buena Park whose enterprise and courage brought hope to the Achenese, a generation ago.
How? By doing what the Navy and international aid agencies once again are having to do to rescue Aceh from its greatest-ever natural disaster,hacking roads through the jungles; building prefab homes, schools and hospitals; fending off tropical diseases and guerilla skirmishers in the forests; above all, reopening a port from which to ship Aceh’s only internationally saleable commodity,high quality, low carbon oil.
Harold and Betty Hutton ran a small business in Orange named Refican.
They earned their living by shipping crankcase drainings they collected from gas stations all over Southern California to Japan after World War II.
They also earned good profits by buying up surplus grease the Navy had stockpiled on the Pacific islands and selling this to Chinese merchants, who turned it into candles for the Buddhist temples of Thailand and the Catholic churches of the Philippines.
Harold then dismantled a disused refinery in Kern County and shipped this in pieces to the tangled mountains of northern Thailand, where the Thai army needed fuel for its war against insurgents along the borders of Burma, now Myanmar.
Little wonder that the Indonesians, looking for an entrepreneur to reopen the wells in north Sumatra, which the Japanese occupiers had destroyed in World War II, enlisted this rough, tough Californian as the ideal man to try his luck in Aceh.
Sailed Minesweeper to Aceh
With his wife, Betty,almost certainly the first and probably the only American woman to penetrate the jungles of northern Sumatra in the 1960s,Harold bought a surplus Navy minesweeper, sailed it from Long Beach to Pankalan Brandan, a muddle little creek on the north coast of Aceh, and used it as his base for a road-building and well-drilling operation that produced the first oil to be exported from postwar Indonesia.
It was backbreaking work in 100-degree heat and 90% humidity, surrounded by mosquitoes and snakes.
Scavenged Medan
To reach the blown-out wells, the Huttons had to build wooden trestle bridges across creeks filled with black ooze, in which several of their trucks disappeared. To rehab the wells and refinery, they scavenged the scrap yards of Medan (the regional capital from which U.S. helicopters now are ferrying food and medicines to Aceh’s tsunami victims), recovering box loads of piston rods, pipe couplings and other oil field iron that had been sold as scrap.
“These they welded, patched, clamped, hammered, soldered and fixed with bailing wire and chewing gum,” wrote one of the Indonesian army officers deployed to guard the Americans. “They put together workable connections between the wells in the jungles and oil storage tanks on the hills.”
Betty, wearing a banderole belt of cartridges, tramped through the forest and traveled up the creeks in a Trojan speedboat to the more inaccessible sites.
There, her husband had erected a carbon black plant and pump maintenance shops.
Recording in her diary how the wash of the Trojan disturbed crocodiles basking along the shore and gibbon monkeys in the trees, she wrote, “Sometimes up, sometimes down, we traveled along a path through thick black mud oozing over our boot tops.
“Our men are trying to get all their materials in place before the rains set in. It is a marvel how these drilling locations can be set up in spite of the obstacles.”
Reopened Wells
And there you have it.
Out of the mud and the jungle, in the teeth of a guerilla war, in spite of the humidity and tsetse flies, the Huttons 40 years ago reopened Aceh’s small,but crucially important,oil wells.
Enterprise, hard work and ambition made millions for both Harold, who died in Hong Kong, age 70, and Betty, who went on to become one of OC’s best-loved and most generous benefactors.
But in Indonesia they are remembered above all else for bringing hope to Aceh.
The Huttons had the qualities that, together with the great aid operation now under way in south Asia, will be needed most to revive Aceh and all the other devastated regions struck down by the great tsunami.
Griffiths, a resident of Laguna Niguel, is an author, journalist, former member of the House of Commons and undersecretary of state in the U.K. government.
