Page 362 - Peterson 85 Years and Going Strong

Kiewit’s Oroville Dam spillway project near completion in June 2019
Peterson’s Chico EPG tech, Pete Melchiori, spent a lot of time out at the dam. He was onsite the day after the alarm sounded. “I was down at the main powerhouse, next to the main spillway. We put in a standby generator to back up their generator at the base of the dam that was having a fuel issue. It was critical to have backup power, just in case, because they couldn’t be without it.” Melchiori was there five days a week, up to sixteen hours a day to sup- port their generators. “Kiewit had at least 20 gen- erators onsite. And every one of them was running continuously because they didn’t have any kind of utility power there. Even though there were power lines overhead on the dam itself, generators were powering that entire site.”
According to Milt Taylor, “Pete was often there on Saturdays and Sundays too. Whatever it took. And if a generator went down and he couldn’t fix it in an hour or so, he’d swap it out with a rental unit because they had to have power.” When the demand was greater than one tech could handle, Peterson Power in San Leandro sent up additional EPG technicians to help out. Peterson also provid- ed chillers for their batch plants in the curing pro- cess as well as A/C in their onsite offices for their personnel during the long hot summers. Product support efforts reached into just about every cor- ner of Kiewit’s contract.
360 | PETERSON: 85 YEARS AND GOING STRONG