Crystal Donner is thinking about the Big One.
Or more precisely, what will happen about 72 hours after the Big One.
The president and CEO of Everett’s Perteet Inc. wants the engineering firm to help communities and other businesses prepare for the aftermath of a massive earthquake.
“Initially, it’s the blue lights, it’s the red lights, it’s the first responders,” Donner said. “When you think about a disaster, after the first three days, then it becomes a public works issue.
“Who is going to clear out the debris? How are you going to rebuild? Many of our public agencies aren’t as prepared as they need to be for that.”
And it’s not just the 9.0-magnitude earthquake. Plenty of smaller naturally occurring events cause problems that fall on the shoulders of overly strapped public works departments.
“We live in a place where we’re prone to some pretty catastrophic disasters and something as simple as a snowstorm can be crippling here, too,” Donner said.
The firm specializes in transportation and construction management, providing an outside engineering resource for cities and counties across the state. Its new Emergency Management Services Division will likely only be a small part of its business plan.
Still, she sees it as a natural extension of Perteet’s work.
“We’re invested here in the community,” Donner said. “We want to provide a service that can really make a difference. That’s what our calling is.”
Perteet Inc. started with humble roots 28 years ago. Engineer Rich Perteet, who is now retired, began the company in the back room of a downtown Everett office.
Perteet Inc. is now headquartered on the ninth floor of the Everett Mutual Tower at 2707 Colby Ave. The firm also has offices in Seattle and Snoqualmie, and opened an office in Ellensburg earlier this year.
In the engineering world, Perteet, with 75 employees, is small compared to multinational corporations that employ tens of thousands.
“We’re very much the David-and-Goliath situation,” Donner said. “After the downturn, there’s just a small handful of firms that even do this work. They were either bought out or didn’t make it through.”
Perteet has worked on major projects across the region, including being the lead designer of the straightening of Highway 522 and the multi-way boulevard of Highway 527 in Bothell. That’s an $80 million public project that has attracted $400 million worth of private development.
The city of Everett has long used Perteet for transportation projects. Perteet’s engineers often understand the community better than some of the larger outside firms, said Dave Davis, the city’s public works director.
“They live in it,” Davis said. “They touch it, they feel it daily and they have a better understanding of our needs than those who are unfamiliar with the pulse of the city.”
Donner has been with Perteet for most of its existence. She grew up in Idaho and went to college at Pacific Lutheran University in Tacoma before graduating from Washington State University.
At PLU, an adviser suggested she study engineering, because she was good at science and math. The first-year coursework was difficult and she almost gave it up.
The father of a college friend at the time was the Snohomish County public works director. He encouraged her to apply for a summer internship with his department, an internship that she won.
“I got to work on a construction site and I fell in love with it,” she said. “I can honestly say if it had not been for an internship, I wouldn’t have stayed with engineering.”
After she graduated in 1990, Donner applied at the county, but the nation was going through another recession and the county’s human resources department was turning away applicants with less than 10 years experience, even for entry-level jobs.
Instead, she was hired by one of those larger engineering firms, Jacobs. She later worked for another large firm, CH2M Hill. She spent five years working for those firms’ Bellevue offices.
“I felt really isolated,” she said. “I had a five-digit employee number. The headquarters (for CH2M Hill) was in Denver. I really felt like I wanted to be somewhere smaller, more responsive, a part of the community.
That’s when she met Rich Perteet, who offered her a job.
“I think I was employee No. 22,” she said. “It was much more connected. Everybody pulled on an oar. You really understand the projects you’re working on.”
At Perteet, Donner was immediately given more responsibility, taking over the management of a couple of projects. Perteet is a small enough firm that engineers get to see projects actually built in the field.
“It’s one thing to draw a line on the paper and say this is a 60-inch pipe,” Donner said. “It’s another to see a 60-inch pipe 10 feet down in the ground, see how big that hole is and see how hard that is for those guys to jack that pipe and move it around. Those are only experiences you get when you’re standing on grade.”
She’s been around long enough to see projects that she designed be redesigned and rebuilt, including the first project she worked on as an intern for the county, Murphy’s Corner at Highway 527 in Mill Creek.
“You know you’re old when they’re ripping up your projects,” she joked. “It’s happened a couple of times now.”
She rose through the ranks and took on a couple of company-wide initiatives as Perteet grew. Eventually Donner became the head of the design team, the biggest division in the company. In 2009, she was offered the job of president and CEO.
“The board appointed me at the end of 2009 as president,” Donner said. “They didn’t tell me that the economy was going to crash and it was going to be a hell of a ride. I should have read the fine print.”
Davis, who has been with the city of Everett for 38 years, has watched Donner rise from a junior engineer to her role as the head of Perteet.
“She is a very solid engineer, but maybe the best asset she has is her people skills,” Davis said. “Her ability to work with customers and, in particular, I’ve noticed her skill in working with her own staff, has been impressive.”
As a woman who is an engineer, she’s found that people are surprised that’s she’s the CEO of the company, especially when she leaves the Northwest.
“When I travel, I’ll end up being in a room and I think, ‘Oh my God, I’m the only woman in the room,’” Donner said. “That doesn’t happen a lot out here.”
Inside Perteet, she’s led an expansion of the scope of work for the firm. She also convinced the former owners to convert Perteet into a 100-percent employee-owned company. Each employee has an Employee Owner placard next to their nameplate.
(Donner’s nameplate in her office reads, ‘La Jefa,’ Spanish for the boss.)
Even before becoming president and CEO of Perteet, Donner was involved in the community. She was one of the voices advocating for a four-year university in Everett, saying there is clearly a need with the number of advanced manufacturing businesses in the area.
“All the while, I was trying not to get into the weeds of all of that,” she said. “I thought transportation politics is were crazy. Higher education politics? I thought I was prepared, because of what I understood about transportation, but I was nowhere prepared for that.”
That led her to become involved with first the Everett Chamber of Commerce and its current iteration, Economic Alliance Snohomish County. She was elected president of Economic Alliance’s Board of Trustees this year.
The effort has led to the growing presence of Washington State University in Everett.
Donner and her husband, Richard, have a son, Alex, 16, and a daughter, Samantha, 15. She said their children might choose to go to WSU, but she saw that a college was needed to keep businesses in the community competitive.
Economic Alliance president and CEO Patrick Pierce met Donner during her advocacy for bringing a university to Everett. He said that she found her a strong proponent for education in general and science, technology and engineering education in specific. He also said she’s been a strong leader in the community.
“I always found her to be very thoughtful and she really cares about Everett and Snohomish County as a whole,” Pierce said.
About a year and a half ago, Kirk Holmes, the public works director for Kittitas County in central Washington, approached her, concerned about emergency preparedness planning. His county had gone through 13 state disasters and three federal disasters.
She said she started looking at the aftermath of a disaster from the perspective of an engineer. The state can experience wildfires, mudslides, flooding and earthquakes. A 9.0-magnitude earthquake would knock down almost every bridge in the county, she said.
“We’re pretty vulnerable especially with a big earthquake,” Donner said.
“The amount of structures alone that couldn’t withstand a Big One is pretty shocking,” she said.
Seattle is one of the better prepared cities in the region, she said. But she was at a presentation with the city’s emergency planning director who pointed out that city’s challenges.
“He was even talking about 60 tower cranes in downtown Seattle,” Donner said. “They were talking about if those things go, all of the emergency routes they had planned that could be open, now you might have the tinker toys lying all over the place.”
That led her to create the Emergency Management Services Division. She hired Holmes from Kittitas County to lead the division. Then, she held a meeting with her own staff and asked them took at their own homes and how they are prepared.
Perteet made changes in house, adding emergency supplies in each of its offices and in each of its vehicles, and moving its computer servers to a different building than its headquarters.
“We were contracting with another company two floors below us,” Donner said. “What if the pipe burst or the building caught on fire. We’ve only got two floors of separation. Great company and we’re still working with them. But it doesn’t need to be the 9.0 earthquake to cause disruption.”
The division is still in its early stages of growth. Perteet plans another company-wide meeting on it later this fall. But Donner said she feels strongly that this is a direction her company should move.
“Our core mission is to make the communities that we live in better,” she said. “Traditionally, we’ve done that through the infrastructure projects. We’ve worked on the roads, utilities and construction management.
“When this presented itself, it seemed like a part of the business that was higher order, but it was the same clients. Not the first responders, but the public works people.”
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