![]() Right now we are not hooked up to PG&E, so there’s no electricity down here. We make sure everybody’s on the same page and we make sure everything is good. The way to avoid that is testing, testing, testing, and quality control. You don’t want problems when you’re energizing that type of power, or bad stuff happens. We have to call in a special company to make the high voltage terminations. You get wires that are larger than a garden hose. There’s a lot involved when you’re working with 12 kV. The city power will only get the water a few stories high. In case of a fire they need to be able to pump the water up to higher floors in the building. Two are for the house power, all the mechanical support systems for the building, such as the elevators, heating and ventilation systems, and then one substation is dedicated for the fire pumps. Four of those substations are 120/208 volts for residential power and the other three are 480 volts. From there it feeds seven substations where the voltage is dropped down. We have 12,000 volts coming into the main electric room. Single-line is all the main power for the building, including the big stuff. General Foreman, Single-Line Power Distribution I like being in touch with the guys who are doing the real work. That is more rewarding to me than the sales and other management things. ![]() I really like having my hands in it and having to solve problems of construction. I went through the apprenticeship program in 1979, then in 1990 worked in management, was general manager of a start-up company, and then in 2008 went back into the field. Now we have less than a half day before they pour the concrete. It used to take a whole day just to lay out the deck. We used to use a tape measure, but we don’t have the time to do that. We use a computerized layout system where we have a transmitter and receiver and we walk around the deck with it and it finds the points. The most challenging thing is the scheduling and coordination of the job between the different trades and general contractors. The only difference now is the magnitude of work and the narrow window of time. I have three general foremen under me and then 15 foremen under them, and each one of them has a small crew of a couple journeymen and apprentices. Putting up a couple 40-story towers out of concrete requires lots of big infrastructure for power and telecommunications. We never used to build concrete this tall, but engineering has changed. So you need to do a lot of problem solving. This guy needs to move 6 inches over and then the next guy moves 6 inches over and the next thing everybody has to move 6 inches over. Up front we use a CAD modeling system and try to resolve all those issues, but as you go through the job, things can change and it can have a ripple effect. For example, a plumbing pipe has to go here and it can’t go anywhere else, or it could be sheet-metal ductwork. Sometimes there are changes in the design. You aim to get everything fixed and resolved before the pour, but sometimes it doesn’t happen. We add an extra pipe here and there, and extra sleeves that go through the concrete, so that if you do lose a pipe, you have a secondary way to get around it. You can’t help but worry that you missed a pipe or that a pipe got broken or damaged during the pour. You have to have it in the slab and accurate. The concrete arrives, and you have to make it whether you’re working early or late. We have half a day to do that before the concrete pour. Then we nail down the boxes and run pipe between them. Each point has a number and the numbers correspond with a lighting, power, or fire alarm box. You walk around, and it says move left, move right. We have a robot that is programmed with all the points. After the decks are constructed, we do the layout.
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