General Advice for building Babel

Babel is fairly strict in following the GNU Build System conventions. Pay close attention to
./configure --help
output. At the end is a list of variables you must set if you want to use particular compilers instead of whatever configure finds by default. E.g. you want to use /bootleg/fortran/intel/9.0/bin/ifort instead of gfortran.

./configure \
--prefix=$HOME/cca/install/babel-intel \
FC=/bootleg/fortran/intel/9.0/bin/ifort \
F77=/bootleg/fortran/intel/9.0/bin/ifort
make install

Another often useful approach when building babel is to do a object-dir build, leaving the source tree untouched and creating all scratch files in a separate object tree.
tar zxf babel-VERSION.tar.gz
mkdir obj-babel
cd obj-babel
../babel-VERSION/configure --srcdir=../babel-VERSION \
--prefix=......etc
make install

After installation, you can just delete the obj-babel directory. This is particularly handy if you are making experimental modifications to the babel sources; you don't have to worry about potential imperfections in the clean and distclean targets of the babel build when rebuilding.