Saturday, Aug 16, 2008

   (From THE WALL STREET JOURNAL) 

   By Chip Cummins 

DUBAI -- David Chambers builds the tallest flagpoles in the world. His current client wants him to stop.

This month, Mr. Chambers is erecting a pole in the wind-swept Azerbaijan capital of Baku. At almost 532 feet, it will be the tallest flagpole on record. Azerbaijani officials, eager to savor the feat, have asked him to hold off building a taller pole for a year, he said.

Clients "always tell us they want this to be the last record," Mr. Chambers said from his small office in Dubai's sprawling port. "But they know, in general, that we're on a roll, and we're gonna build more poles."

A monster-flagpole building boom is sweeping across Central Asia and the Middle East, and Mr. Chambers, an American entrepreneur, is at the center of the frenzy. In the past eight years, he and his small company have built the world's four tallest "unsupported," or freestanding, flagpoles. The Baku pole will top all of them.

"He pretty much has a monopoly," says Craig Glenday, editor-in-chief of London-based Guinness World Records Ltd., which keeps track.

Delegations from Turkey, Kazakhstan and Tajikistan -- all interested in their own poles, Mr. Chambers says -- flew in to see him in late July in Turkmenistan, where in June he raised the current record holder, at just over 436 feet. (The Statue of Liberty, by comparison, is 305 feet tall.)

Several clients in the oil-rich Persian Gulf -- including the governments of Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Oman and Qatar -- are also talking to him, he says. But the Middle East clients all want to be last on his list, in hopes they can hold on to the record longest.

"They're waiting for the dust to settle," Mr. Chambers says.

In the late 1990s, Mexico's army erected a series of super-tall flagpoles across the country. Inspired by the effort, a prominent sheikh and government minister in Abu Dhabi, the capital of the United Arab Emirates, decided his city needed one, too. To get the job done, he turned to Mr. Chambers, at the time working as a contractor for the one of the sheikh's businesses.

Mr. Chambers doesn't have an engineering background, but he quickly pulled together a team and sketched out a plan. In July 2001, the group raised its first record holder, at about 404 feet.

He left his employer shortly after to start up his own company, Trident Support Corp. In addition to really tall flagpoles, the firm manufactures smaller ones, along with cellphone towers and stadium lighting.

Meanwhile, officials in the court of King Abdullah II of Jordan started looking for someone to build a super-tall pole in the capital, Amman. "His majesty knew that the highest one was in Abu Dhabi," a royal spokeswoman says. So, the Royal Hashemite Court hired Mr. Chambers to build one about a dozen feet taller, about 416 feet.

After that one went up in May 2003, the king's office called again. "We gotta have another one," Mr. Chambers says a court official told him. The next year, he raised a pole in Aqaba, Jordan, measuring 431 feet. (The pole flies the flag of the Arab revolt, during which Aqaba was captured from the Ottoman Empire in 1917.)

Trident manufactures the steel segments of the poles in a fabrication yard in Dubai. Then it ships them to their future home. Using giant cranes, Mr. Chambers's team hoists them on top of each other and bolts them together. The price tag can stretch to several million dollars.

He also provides the flags -- some of the world's largest, measuring about three-quarters the length of a football field. Trident trains teams to raise and lower the giant flags and to repair damage.

Last fall, the Azerbaijani government ordered a flagpole measuring 492 feet, enough to break the Aqaba record with plenty of pole to spare. But midway through construction, Mr. Chambers got a call from Baku.

He says he was told the country's president wanted to top North Korea's 525-foot-tall flagpole, near the border with South Korea. It sits atop a tower -- so it doesn't qualify for Guinness's "unsupported" category. But Azerbaijani officials wanted to beat it anyway. (The president's office said a spokesman wasn't available to comment, and officials didn't respond to emailed questions.)

Earlier this year, Turkmenistan cut a deal for its own tall pole. Mr. Chambers agreed to build one smaller than the Azerbaijani pole, which was already under construction. But he said he'd finish it quicker.

That way, Turkmenistan could hold the record for at least a few weeks. They got a discount because their record won't last, Mr. Chambers says. Turkmenian officials don't seem disappointed that it will be short-lived.

"They are really proud of their new flagpole right now," says Bathuran Arslan, an executive for a private Turkmenian company that brokered the deal between the government and Mr. Chambers. "All records will be broken some day."

The earliest record Guinness has of a really tall flagpole is a 214-foot wooden flag staff erected in 1919 in England's Kew Gardens, according to Guinness's Mr. Glenday. In 1985, a 282-foot pole in Vancouver, British Columbia, made an appearance in the record books. It wasn't technically a flagpole, though. It supported a 205-foot ice-hockey stick.

Since his Abu Dhabi pole went up in 2001, Mr. Chambers has dominated the category. He thinks the highest flagpole he can build would probably be some 720 feet tall. That's only because of the current size of cranes used to lift pole segments into place.

With that constraint in mind, he says, he will now only agree to build new poles just one meter -- 3.28 feet -- higher than the previous record. Potential clients don't like that, but Mr. Chambers says it will stretch out his orders.

He may have competition, however. A Beaumont, Texas, company is negotiating with a client to build a 550-foot pole, according to Jarred Romanos, the sales manager for the firm, U.S. Flag & Flagpole Supply Inc.

In 1999, U.S. Flag erected a 200-foot pole in Panama. It also helped Mr. Chambers with design and engineering work for three of his five record-breaking poles, both companies say.

Mr. Romanos says his potential client is somewhere in the Middle East but doesn't want to be identified until construction starts. That's to keep neighbors from planning their own, taller poles.

"It's important that they keep the record as long as they can," Mr. Romanos says. "It's a pride thing."

(END) Dow Jones Newswires

16-08-08 0705GMT