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Drilling and building the foundations for power transmission lines is a specialty that of late has been absorbed into larger companies. “We put in the foundation and somebody else puts up the towers and the lines,” President Jim Melcher explains. “They build the substation next to the distribution, and some even build power plants.

Some of our competitors have been acquired, but we’ve held out mainly because it’s a lifestyle choice to be independent.“I’m not sure we’re conquering as much territory as we would have had we become a part of a bigger company, but that’s not been our goal – to be the biggest,” he declares. “We’ve always wanted to be the best and retain our independence, and we’ve done both of those pretty well.”

The company is celebrating its 55th anniversary in 2010. In its second generation of family management, Tri-State Drilling Inc. began as a municipal water well contractor and pump supplier. It was founded by pump salesman Bob Melcher (Jim’s father), driller Wayne Riethmiller, driller’s helper Ralph Eisele and mechanic Clarence Berthiaume. Those four were the company’s first employees as well as its co-owners.

In the 1960s, Tri-State began moving from drilling for water to removing it by drilling dewatering holes. The company also began drilling foundations for buildings. By the 1970s, the company could install foundations in wet soils. Tri-State also developed techniques to move quickly from drill site to drill site, and this caught the attention of power line contractors. By 1980, drilling and building foundations for power lines became more than half of the company’s volume.

Towers and Bridges

“We had huge buildout in cell phone towers, and before that, a wave of long distance microwave signal relay towers,” Melcher remembers. The company drills foundations for buildings and bridges, and is expecting to drill more transmission tower foundations for wind and solar power plants and for alternative energy sources.
Melcher also thinks many utilities have put off construction of additional capacity for about as long as they can. To mitigate the potential for future blackouts or rolling brownouts, utilities are making capital investments. Bringing that power to customers will require transmission tower foundations.

A typical power transmission line foundation job is the one Tri-State completed in October 2010 for Dominion Electric of Virginia from Meadow Brook Substation to Loudoun Substation in northern Virginia. The 93-mile job – which is V-shaped to avoid crossing environmentally sensitive lands – is part of a larger project that starts in Pennsylvania and then crosses West Virginia into Virginia.
“We had some really hard rock at the end of the job, up toward the West Virginia end,”?Melcher says. “We did some R&D and learned some new tools were available and designed some of our own tools that we don’t think anybody has ever done.”

One of Tri-State’s consultants, Center Rock, was selected to assist in the rescue of the Chilean miners who had been trapped in a collapsed mine for months. Another notable job Tri-State Drilling just started in October 2010 is known as Tehachapi and is located in Kern and Los Angeles Counties.“California is a different kind of place to work,” Melcher laconically concedes. Pressed to elaborate, he allows, “Regulations are in a very advanced state of development there, and you learn a lot of law just to get a project off the ground.”

Coast to Coast

Tri-State Drilling works in the continental United States and Alaska. “One unique thing about us is we take our qualified people everywhere and do as much of the work as we can with them, and we bring them home almost every weekend,” Melcher says. “So we’ve got highly specialized crews to do this sort of work, and we treat them extremely well – like a family.
“We do also hire in the local area to fill a need, and we occasionally meet people who like our work, are good at it, and are willing to travel – we have a couple out of Ohio, Connecticut, Florida, and one each from the Northwest, Wisconsin and Iowa. So the guys do come from more than just the metropolitan area of Minneapolis and St. Paul, and all get the same deal.”Melcher figures his company has less than 1 percent of the power transmission line foundation market, and considers three other companies his only coast-to-coast competitors.

“We’re not the biggest – we’re probably in the middle – but we think we’re the best at what we do,” he says. “Our goal is to astound our new customers with the way we go about our work.”

Most regional foundation drilling companies also do transmission tower foundations. “One key is moving from site to site to perform the installation,” Melcher maintains. “However, some companies’ equipment and crews have been set up mainly to install many foundations at one building site.”Tri-State developed its mobile operation from dewatering for utility contractors, which required moving along a line to drill the wells. A truck-mounted drill rig, a boom truck and hydraulic rams on the old cable-tool rigs were crucial and enabled Tri-State’s crews to move and set up quickly.

A third generation is joining Tri-State – Melcher’s nephew Anthony Mehr is working on the Tehachapi job in California – and family is important to the company. “We’ve got a few different things going on,” Melcher notes. “One is we want everybody to feel like family.” That includes not just the family of the owners but the employees, as well. They bring in their brothers and uncles, and one guy – maybe more than one – even brought his dad in.”

The company also has integrated sales with project management. In­stead of a salesman waving goodbye to the customer once a job is won, “He’s going to stick around and manage the job and make sure that what was promised gets delivered,” he says. “I’m not sure how common that is – if you bid a job, you probably will wind up being the project manager.”