Page 183 - Peterson 85 Years and Going Strong

The reason we exist
At 8 p.m. on Friday, April 27, 2012, a fleet of Cat- erpillar excavators rumbled out to their starting positions along the elevated deck of Doyle Drive. They had just twenty-four hours to demolish over five thousand feet of pavement so a temporary by- pass could be built before Monday morning’s five o’clock commute. The countdown was on.
San Francisco’s $1.1 billion Presidio Parkway Proj- ect was designed to bring the southern approach of the Golden Gate Bridge up to current seismic standards. The 1.6-mile stretch of US-101 was originally commissioned back in 1936 along with the Golden Gate Bridge. The old roadway had sustained only superficial damage during the 1989 Loma Prieta earthquake, but it awoke Caltrans and city officials to its increasing vulnerability to future seismic events. The current project had been fifteen years in the making, all funded by federal stimulus money.
Long-time Peterson customer Ferma Corp. had the demolition portion of the contract. Due to the tight schedule, they couldn’t afford any down- time so they rented everything they could get their hands on to beef up their own fleet. Much of it came from Peterson. “Lots of people said it couldn’t be done but we made sure that we had every possible excavator available to them during that job,” says John Krummen, executive VP and general manager of Peterson Power Systems. “The only way Ferma could win that contract in the first place was to beat out the competition on time be- cause they weren’t going to come in the lowest bid. So they planned to take that bridge down in record time.”
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