Page 239 - Peterson 85 Years and Going Strong

Together we do what we couldn’t do alone
From 1995 to 2006, Independent reshaped
San Ramon’s Dougherty Valley into a 6,000-acre suburban entity. They had 150 pieces of equipment on one phase east of Dougherty. They’d park them at lunchtime for fueling and lubrication, in two lines, each a quarter-mile long.
applications and paperwork to get Indy’s first machines into the program. “I was sitting in a restaurant with Dan one day when he got the call from the Moyer people saying they had ap- proved funding for $10 million. It was for re- powering twenty-five machines.”
In the beginning, Merrigan was apprehensive.
“It called for replacing a large D346 engine with
a much smaller engine in our 651s,” says Merrigan. “Even though it was a much more efficient engine, we just weren’t sure if it could do the job. We wanted to see how one came out before we went ahead with the rest. But each one we did was an absolute hit.”
“We went from Tier 0 to Tier 1 in 2002. And then the engines started upgrading rapidly,” recalls Merrig- an. “The rules stated that you had to use the best available technology. So you’d have a machine in contract
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