After about 15 years, Ken Phillips came back home to Gregory Drilling. Though the North Bend, Washington-based company does everything from geothermal to geotechnical to irrigation, Phillips settled back in as Gregory’s sonic operations manager after years sharpening his drilling skills elsewhere.
Now, he oversees crews working a TerraSonic 150CC crawler out of northern California. Though they do travel just about anywhere west of the Mississippi, they do a lot of work in the Golden State — with all the varied geology it has to offer. He says they get into silt, sands, cobble and boulders, and overburden, all depending on where the day’s project took them.