Page 383 - Peterson 85 Years and Going Strong

SUKUT TAKES THE LEAD
In January 2019, Sukut invited Pacific States Environmental and Goodfellow Bros. of California to form a partner- ship to pursue the $800 million Camp Fire cleanup contract. “We do quite a few joint ventures,” says Steve Yurosek, president of Sukut Construction, which is based out of Santa Ana, California. “We wanted to partner with companies we knew we could work with and had expertise in the field as well.”
In 2005, Sukut Construction established an Environmental Market Division comprised of landfill construction and closures, brownfield site cleanups, and fire remediation. Today, fire remediation is roughly 60 percent of their work. Before 2015, it was less than 15 percent. “We’ve been doing fires since 2007,” says Eddie Juarez, vice president
of Sukut’s Environmental Division, “but they were more one-offs. Since 2015, it has really jumped. We get fires in Southern California, but the bigger more destructive ones seem to be up north.”
As head of the Environmental Division, Juarez was tasked with determining the scope and logistics of the Camp Fire contract and was one of the first to visit Paradise after the Camp Fire. “The first time I drove through Paradise, I was in complete shock. I’d never seen anything like it before. Some of the other fires we’ve worked on like the Detwiler and the Thomas fires were massive, but they didn’t devastate an entire city. Paradise was completely wiped out. Businesses, homes, churches—everything. It was frightening. As a contractor, you look at that and the resources it’s going to take to clean all that up, and it’s not something that one contractor can handle on their own.”
That’s when Sukut decided to form a joint venture and pool their resources with Pacific States and Goodfellow Bros. And they definitely got it done faster. Their last load out was on October 23, 2019. The original target date was February 2020.
SPSG got the south side of town; ECC got the north side. And Florida-based Ceres got the unin- corporated area. SPSG committed forty-five crews to the cleanup effort, fifteen crews per partner. As the project became more routine, that number grew to eighteen. Crews consisted of a 325 excavator, a
289D track loader (or 259D, 299D), a 500-gallon water buffalo, plus two operators and two labor- ers on the ground. And every site was under the constant scrutiny of an on-site FEMA inspector. “Our job is to mitigate anything on that lot that’s extra and hazardous,” explains Vandegriff. “We’re
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