Page 354 - Peterson 85 Years and Going Strong

(L-R) Duane Doyle Sr., Bill Doyle, and Duane Jr. visited Oroville Dam in August 2017 for Bill’s 87th birthday. He passed away six months later. The original Oroville Dam construction was a key event in Bill’s early career at Peterson.
smooth out with a small dozer, compact, and you’re done. It’s thick like oatmeal, so you don’t normally have to do any forming. And the dozers won’t sink in it.” Kiewit crushed over 2.5 million tons of re- claimed aggregate, primarily to make the one mil- lion cubic yards of RCC it used for both spillways.
“From the beginning, we knew it was going to be a two-season job to complete the spillway because of the amount of work,” says Petersen. “We weren’t
going to be able to get the final concrete done on that middle chute where all the big holes were, the first year. Instead, we filled that big hole with RCC and built sixteen-foot-high temporary sidewalls so they could use the spillway during the winter.” That winter turned out to be much milder than the previous one, so the spillway never had to be used.
PHASE TWO (2018)
At the start of Phase Two, Kiewit demolished the temporary walls and floor slabs on the mid- dle chute and crushed them for RCC. Then it was all about getting the entire spillway fortified and poured in construction-grade concrete, and com- plete again by November 1. Kiewit installed thir- teen 300-ton Liebherr cranes as an aerial transport system up and down the 3,000-foot-long spillway. “Crews built crane pads and set up the cranes stra- tegically so they could all reach certain areas and get the spillway and side walls up quickly,” says Ni- par. “Those cranes moved everything—generators, excavators, light towers—whatever was needed to get the job done. The team also tied millions of pounds of rebar on the walls and slabs and moved them down the spillway by crane for placement.”
Left to right: Meticulous cleaning of bedrock to insure a clean bond between concrete and rock in September 2018; Breaking up the first season’s temporary walls of roller-compacted concrete (RCC) in May 2018
352 | PETERSON: 85 YEARS AND GOING STRONG