Page 396 - Peterson 85 Years and Going Strong

(retired 1988) for the southern half of the Plains Division. “At the time, that was the largest single order, I believe, that Caterpillar had ever received. It delivered to Empire in March 1965 and includ- ed four Cat Dual D9Gs.” As the job grew, so did the fleet. By late 1967, the full thirteen were work- ing on-site.
Excerpts from an article in Caterpillar WORLD magazine further explains: “The largest fleet of Caterpillar tractor-scrapers and Dual D9G trac- tors ever assembled has been teamed with belt conveyors to dig the pit that will be the Twin Buttes Mine. Anaconda’s advanced technique for removing overburden begins at the bottom of the pit with a fleet of thirteen Dual D9Gs push-load- ing tractor-scrapers. . . . Before rock is reached, they will have moved more than twice the earth moved to build Oroville Dam, and before the mine has operated a decade, more than was taken from the Panama Canal. . . . They are hauling away millions of tons of overburden—sand, gravel, and
caliche—to expose the ore-bearing rock that lies 460 feet beneath the surface. Two hundred mil- lion tons must be removed before the first rock is reached.”6 The Anaconda thirteen proves that Cat- erpillar was making 66A Quads concurrently with Peterson’s SEQ (Special Equipment Services) shop—before they officially bought the patent and renamed the machine the DD9G.
STILL AROUND
Today, Scarsella Bros. of Kent, Washington owns four Quads. Their father bought the first one—a 1966 vintage set of 66A machines—from Central Machinery in Montana back in June 1970. “We had a pretty good-sized dirt project at SeaTac air- port in 1970, and that’s where it first went to work; that’s also where I started getting familiar with it,” says Don Scarsella, one of five brothers who own the business. “The very last time we ran them was 1993–94 on two back-to-back jobs in eastern
Anaconda bought 13 Quad D9s for their copper mine operation at Twin Butte Mines in Arizona in 1964-67
6 Max Bass, “Anaconda’s Twin Buttes Mine”, Caterpillar WORLD, Oct/Nov 1967, p2-7. 394 | PETERSON: 85 YEARS AND GOING STRONG