Page 349 - Peterson 85 Years and Going Strong

Dredging the Feather River for debris from the spillway break of February 2017
On February 12, local officials evacuated 188,000 people in the downstream communities, just in case. By the time the situation was neutralized, a deep canyon split the top from the bottom of the 3,000-foot-long spillway.
Once the first responders left, Dutra and Lund Construction worked around the clock dredging a million cubic yards of debris out of the river and stockpiling it for reuse later. In early April, four contractors were invited to bid on the job. At $275.4 million, Kiewit was the lowest bidder, but only by a little more than a million dollars. “We had never bid a job so quickly,” says Joe Whelan, Kiewit’s equipment supervisor.“They announced it on April 6. Ten days later we had the contract. The following Monday, we started moving in equip- ment.” According to Dave Nipar, Peterson’s local parts & service rep, “Kiewit was the only contrac- tor who could deliver this contract because it has the global reach, the resources, the experience, and the manpower to mobilize that quickly.”
“When I got there, the old spillway was just a huge hole,” says Scott Shockman, Kiewit’s equipment manager, who arrived on May 21. “It was like look- ing down into a canyon, probably 150 feet deep. Some of the blown-out chunks of concrete at the bottom were the size of a semi-truck. It was amaz- ing. I’ve never seen anything like it before.”
And the rain just kept coming, fueled by a series of atmospheric river storms off the coast—often called Pineapple Express storms. The DWR had no choice but to use the main spillway to siphon off the excess water out of Lake Oroville, to get them through the rainy season. By March, that initial pothole had grown to a gaping crevasse, in some places three hundred feet deep.
ENTER PETERSON
Severe weather and flooding have always been a problem in the northern reaches of the Central
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