Page 184 - Peterson 85 Years and Going Strong
P. 184

 CORE VALUE: CUSTOMER FIRST
  And that’s exactly what they did. Uptime was crucial for the tight deadline. “We spent quite a bit of time planning out this project,” explains Rob Verga, Ferma’s equipment manager. “We broke everything down into fifteen-minute increments. And we relied on Peterson because we didn’t have time to experiment around. We know their reputation because we’ve been dealing with them for fifty years. They have never failed us yet.”
Ferma’s fleet of excavators, outfitted with cutters, hammers, and concrete crunchers, moved with the speed of urgency. They had to. Otherwise, a hefty fine was sitting on the other side of Monday morning. Their fleet included Cat 330s, 345s, 365s, 375s, 385s, and a massive 140-ton Cat 5110 excavator. Six machines worked on each stretch of roadway at a time, clipping, crunching, and pulverizing the concrete into blocks of debris. Ferma crews then loaded them into dump trucks and hauled it all offsite for recycling later. They were able to recycle 100 percent of the material, which netted sixty-five thousand tons of concrete and five million pounds of steel rebar.
In the wash of the high-powered tower lights, two rotating teams of technicians worked through the night to keep all the excavators and support machines in top running condition over the weekend. Peterson’s Ashley Harden and Billy Hinds each led a crew of three technicians in twelve- to sixteen-hour shifts for around- the-clock coverage. “It was like Beirut out there,” recalls Harden, Ferma’s resident Peterson tech at the time. “I’ve never been in a war zone before, but it was a night of pure chaos. Organized chaos. We were driving our service trucks around, and there were chunks of freeway coming down. Debris was flying everywhere.” The technicians had to work wherever the machines broke down; there was no roped-off repair area out of the way. And they worked with one eye on their surroundings because things moved so quickly. “We’d be working on a machine and then all of a sudden they’d be right on top of us,” says Harden. “You’d constantly be looking around. It wasn’t like they stayed in one place for an hour. Within minutes they’d be coming toward you. And you’d have to hurry up because they were coming. Fast.”
A team of excavators works side by side to demolish Doyle Drive near the San Francisco Presidio in April 2012
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