In an earlier letter I mentioned doing a storage yard for NYSE+G. Lloyd Rowland’s dad Stu held a supervisory position at NYSEG. It was through him that we started bidding jobs for them.
The Lancaster storage yard was the first. After proving our abilities, we did a very large substation expansion on Stolle Road in Elma. This consisted of building a few acres pad, fencing, ground grid, and excavations and pedestals for transmission equipment.
It was on this job that I discovered where I ranked on the operator standings. A portion of the job was tractor backhoe digging around existing electrically charged buss bars and transformers.
The first day of this duty the NYSEG guys were surprised to see me. At that time, I had torn up a good deal of stuff and had a reputation for being a tad reckless.
After an hour of lectures, we went to work. Probably 40% of the time we were under the buss bars that had high voltage running on the outside surface. Every time I moved the machine, they would move the ground cable before I could dig. The first day I asked if that would save me if I boomed into the busses. They informed me that if I was grounded, they would be able to differentiate between the machine and my carcass. Truly though the old man had finally had enough of me.
I felt pretty good when I was needed on some other job for a couple of days, and the NYSEG guys shut out job down instead of bringing in another operator. I must have foiled his plans to get rid of me!
Another job we had was Route 474 in Cutting, NY from route 426 to the Pennsylvania line. This job was your typical highway drainage, small structures widening and paving. This job was quite remote and concrete delivery was challenging. I will explain next week why we had mobile mixers, but these new things solved the Redi-mix problem. We found ourselves in the concrete production once again. Supplying all the concrete for the project.
(This week’s story has no photos)
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