Page 114 - Peterson 85 Years and Going Strong

CORE VALUE: TEAMWORK
the world. But it did happen and it caught many people off guard. The utility also warned that there could be more, so we had to wrap our heads around it and get prepared.”
That first official Public Safety Power Shutoff was the smallest and, in hindsight, the weakest of the PSPS events. Each subsequent response has gotten stronger and more efficient. “PSPS-1 was kind of hands off for us,” recalls Skip Ray, rental sales/project manager. “It was a phone call and an inventory list. That was it. Some- one from their rental operations office called asking for a list of everything we had available. By the end of the day, they emailed back that they wanted it all—100kWs, 150s, 200s and 300kW generators—all thirteen we had available at the time. Some of those units never even left our yard but all were on contract, waiting to be used. I don’t know what they actually took out and installed,” says Ray. “Our technicians didn’t do anything on PSPS-1. We didn’t deliver them; we didn’t install them; we didn’t fuel them. But all of those units were under the care and control of the utility company for two weeks.”
Public reaction to the power shutoff ranged from irritation to hysteria. “You would walk into a supermarket and find people clearing shelves into their carts with their arm,” says Schalk, “because they didn’t know when the power would be restored. It was a strange thing to see, almost like walking into a movie. People were buy- ing small generators to power up their homes and businesses. Every single one of our 300 small generators was out on rent.” PSPS-1 finally ended when the utility restored power to all North Bay customers by 8pm on June 8 and all Sierra Nevada Foothill customers by 6pm on June 9.
UPPING THE ANTE: PSPS-2
By the time the second event hit on September 23,the utility had a much better grasp of the situation. “This one was handled by the engineers in the field who actually run the jobs,” says Ray. “They wanted our large 2 MW power modules for several big primary jobs besides all the smaller units. And this time, they were very specific about what they needed.” Peterson’s rental team worked non-stop to pull it all together, from the time the call came in at 6pm Friday until three the next morning. “We were on conference calls with Quinn-Cat (Central Valley) and Hawthorne-Cat (San Diego), grabbing everything they had available to support what we didn’t have enough of at the time—power modules, transformers, load banks, and high voltage equipment. And the customer wanted everything delivered by Saturday morning and live by Saturday afternoon.”
For that second event, the utility powered four substations in the Sierra Nevada Foothills with rental gener- ators—6 MW in Placerville, 9 MW in Grass Valley, and 8 MW between two pumping stations in Auburn. They also deployed 27 smaller single generators from Placerville north to Redding. “In Auburn, we actually had units down on the American River about 1500 feet below town,” says Ray. “And there were six 1500 hp pumps going up over the hill to Grass Valley.The drive motors on those pumps were the size of a pickup truck. When you heard them fire up and saw how much power there was, it was just insane. Without that power, Grass Valley would have run out of water in 24 hours and backed up their entire sewer system.”
ROUND THE CLOCK SUPPORT
The other part of the job was monitoring the load to ensure everything went well for the duration of the proj- ect.“We provide 24/7 product support on our rental equipment when these big substations go off line and our
112 | PETERSON: 85 YEARS AND GOING STRONG