Testimonials

My name is Joe Koppeis. I’m the developer of Rock City in Belmar, Illinois. Rock City is an abandoned limestone quarry that the Village of Belmar was forced to buy after the 1993 floods. I’d never done any kind of development in any kind of mine, just normal conventional above-ground construction, so we had no idea what we were doing. We interviewed several engineering firms and got several opinions from different companies, and some of them just weren’t feasible. Some of the recommendations they had and some of the thoughts that they had. In that process, PENTA was one of the companies we interviewed and went through, and they took a much more common-sense approach to things. They helped us find solutions as opposed to reasons we couldn’t do things. They helped me figure out what we could do, what did work. If there are areas they didn’t think we should develop in, they just came out and said, “None.” I’ve overheard in the air or whatever the issue was, and helped us find areas that were safest, the easiest to develop in, and most economical to develop, from:

• length of the roof bolts
• bolting pattern
• scaling
• inspections in the ceiling

to say, “This is a natural crack and this is one we need to bolt around.” They really gave us a lot of direction and helped us with air quality studies. There’s an underground lake, so determining how much water is there:

• Do we want to pump it out?
• Do we want to save it for fire suppression in the future?
• Do we want to save it for cooling the data center in the future?
• What are our best options?

They really helped me answer a lot of questions and ask a lot of questions to think through things to help us in the overall development plan for Rock City. They’re very responsive. They’re very common sense.

We had a scaling company that was doing an inspection of some of the finished areas, and they tried to knock a rock down. They couldn’t get it and decided that they needed to bring in a bunch of equipment and try to make this rock fall. I called PENTA for a second opinion to get them to come out. They came out and looked and said, “Well, probably is never gonna come down, but a better approach would be to strap it up instead of trying to take it down.” I brought the other company back and said, “What if we can just strap up there and bolt it? Would that solve the problem?” Yeah, that’ll solve the problem. It was a lot less expensive, it was a lot faster, it was a lot less disruptive to our customer, and everything worked fine.

They kinda have a common sense approach to what they do, and it really works well and served us well. Absolutely, the PENTA guys again are very thorough, but they also have a lot of common sense, and that’s as important as having engineering degrees and the background for that. Common sense goes a long way, and again they are not afraid to tell me something that I don’t want to hear if they think the bolt pattern should be tighter than I think it should be. They do what’s right and they tell me what we need to do, but they’re very reputable, very ethical, and they get in, get the job done, and give it to them in time. Absolutely, I recommend PENTA to anyone that needs engineering services. They’ve done a great job for us.