Davey Tree Flipbooks

9 March/April 2023 | THE DAVEY BULLETIN the bridges washed out. Road closures made it difficult for us to get from one location to another. The dispatch center would call for a crew, and sometimes we weren't able to get to the location due to flooding," Maldonado said. "The work was highly stressful, and the conditions required high situational awareness. What I heard from those in the field was that the work was both exciting and rewarding." DRG PACIFIC SERVICES ASSESSES VEGETATION SAFETY Rob Toney, operations vice president, DRG Pacific Services, LLC, said, "The atmospheric rivers brought an incredible amount of water, much more than I've ever seen, and soils were completely saturated. Flooding was widespread, and the fact that we had successive storms meant the high water table and flooding didn't have a chance to subside before the next system came in." Toney went on to say, in the Santa Cruz Mountains, the main area his teams were working in, was seeing soil saturation on mountain slopes in a way they had not seen previously. "All the hillsides and slopes were unstable. There were mudslides and unstable trees everywhere," Toney added. The DRG Pacific Services team of 102 employees aided PG&E with electrical infrastructure damage caused by the storms. DRG foresters assessed the safety of vegetation in power outage locations ahead of line construction crew work, Toney said. They worked all up and down the Northern to Central California coast, including Mendocino, Sonoma, Marin, and San Mateo Counties, with 90% of the response in Santa Cruz County. "We had employees going way above and beyond the call of duty. It was a big ask for a lot of people. Team members were putting in 60 to 80-hour weeks, working 10 to 12 hours a day through really difficult circumstances," Toney said. "Those were rough storms, and they were out in it all day, every day. They lived the Davey values and were out there helping to restore power for thousands of Californians, as well as protecting the safety of the lineworkers and construction crews they worked alongside. You can't do a much more noble thing in our industry." BAY AREA R/C OFFICES WORK ON RESIDENTIAL AND MUNICIPAL RECOVERY EFFORTS Travis Evans, market manager, Bay Area operations, R/C services, said the relentlessness of the storms led to the magnitude of damage. All seven Bay Area offices, which includes East Bay, Menlo Park, Napa, Sacramento, San Francisco, Santa Clara, and Santa Cruz, were affected. The Sacramento, Santa Cruz, and Napa offices were hit the hardest. "Year over year, the work done in the Bay Area was up 30% in January. A lot of that was attributed to many offices working six days a week, trying to stay on top of the workload created by the storms," Evans said. John Arnett, district manager, Sacramento office, said these storms were the most significant ones he's dealt with in his entire decades-long career. "The storms kept coming, one after the other. With the rain and wind specifically, we got hit with wave after wave. At one point, we had winds at 68 Francisco Hernandez, vegetation management inspector, DRG Pacific Services, LLC, called an all-stop on China Grade road in Boulder Creek, California, upon discovering the road had washed out and the location was inaccessible. PG&E employees, along with Surgery Company and DRG crews, gather at a morning safety briefing at the Monterey base camp. Storms Hit California continued on page 10

• Cover