Page 384 - Peterson 85 Years and Going Strong

very careful not to over-excavate. We want to get it right to the spec line and take as little out as we can to make each site 100 percent clean. Once they mark it certified, we move on to the next site.”
Work didn’t progress as methodically as they’d hoped—house by house, street by street. “We bounced around like a shotgun,” says Vandegriff. “We were jumping all over the place as they as- signed us lots that had been funded and cleared for cleanup. It was a logistical nightmare. When we finished one, the next one might be a mile away, so we’d have to haul all that equipment across town versus having five lots right next to each other, approved and ready to go. We would have loved to have jumped from pad to pad to pad, but most times that just didn’t happen.”
Vandegriff and John Wells, general manager of Peterson Tractor, had driven through the town of Paradise in early February 2019 to assess the scope of the job. The snow was falling and formed a white blanket, a stark contrast to the burnt-out skeleton of the town. “It was the ultimate hill fire. Just mass destruction,” recalls Vandegriff. “The contrast between the black and burnt aspect of the fire against the lily-white snow was very, very eerie. It looked even darker because I knew the devasta- tion it held for the families up there. It was heart- breaking. Apocalyptic.
SITECH’s Chris Mata helps Argonaut with their payload control systems
“One of the first days of the cleanup, as we started to clean a house pad, I looked behind me and saw a family standing there, watching us work on their lot. You could see the heartache. Lots of hugging and holding hands. It was very sad. These people had lost everything. We saw kids lose their schools, their homes, and parents lose their place of em- ployment. They got the Triple Crown of Crap. As Pacific States, remediation is our business. We couldn’t control the circumstances that brought us into Paradise. We’d prefer to stick with demolish- ing old dilapidated buildings and working in ur- ban areas and landfills. But we’re good at what we do. And we wanted to get people back into their homes as soon as possible.”
TECHNOLOGY ON THE PILE
Paradise was a beehive of activity all through the hot summer months of 2019 and into the fall. By the third week of October, the cleanup was fin- ished. Contractors started pulling out and heading
Paradise destroyed
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