It may not compare with Alaska’s $8 billion, 800-mile oil pipeline of 1975-77, but Cass County’s portion of the 357-mile natural gas pipeline being buried across Northeast Texas and Louisiana this summer is having a tremendous impact.

And some of the same people who built the Alaska Pipeline are building this one, too.

Atlanta businessman Peter Patel, owner of Best Western Pineywood Inn, describes the local economic impact of union-wage pipeline workers flooding into the area.

“We would have been a dead fish this summer,” he said. “All across the U.S., trave...