Dani Okonkwo — lead operator, pipe-bursting.
Dani drives the bursting head on every pull. She runs the locator on every survey. She has personally pulled 426 of the 743 burst jobs in the shop's history. The crew jokes that she has more time on a TRIC Tools winch than anyone else in Western New York; this is, as far as we can tell, factually true.
§ I · Background
Dani is from Lagos, Nigeria, originally; she moved to Buffalo in 2007 with her parents and her younger brother. She graduated from Lafayette High School in 2011 and joined a regional excavation contractor that summer as a laborer. Twelve years there — first laborer, then equipment operator (mini-excavator, then track loader, then full-size excavator), then crew lead — gave her the dig-side fluency that is the engine of every successful pipe-burst job. She has dug pits in every kind of Buffalo soil, from the Forest Avenue glacial till to the Niagara waterfront fill.
She joined Reuter & Knapp in 2019, attracted by the smaller scale and the per-dossier pace of the work. The transition from a forty-person excavation crew to a seven-person trades shop was, in her telling, "the best decision I have made since picking the school where I learned to weld."
§ II · What she does at the shop
- Operates the TRIC Tools M-100 static pulling rig on every burst.
- Runs the Radiodetection RD8200 sonde locator on every CCTV survey (Seth runs the crawler; Dani runs the surface trace).
- Trains apprentices on burst-day choreography (the difference between a clean pull and a stuck cable is preparation, not improvisation).
- Maintains the rig — daily greasing, weekly hydraulic-oil check, monthly cable inspection and replacement schedule.
- Coordinates with private utility-locate vendors (GPRS, USIC) on every burst.
§ III · Certifications & credentials
| UA Local 22 Journeyman | Card #2019-447 (since 2019, having transferred relevant hours) |
| NASSCO PACP v8 | Cert. #PACP-2020-0851, recertified 2024 |
| NASSCO LACP | Cert. #LACP-2021-0099 |
| OSHA 30 Construction | Current |
| Confined-Space Entry (NIOSH) | Current |
| Excavator operator | NCCER 2014 |
| HAZWOPER 40-hour | Current (relevant for lead-pipe handling) |
| NAUI Master Diver | 2017 (transferable patience for cure timing — Al insists this is real) |
§ IV · How customers describe working with her
"On burst day, Dani had the truck staged before I was awake. She walked me through the pit, the cable path, and the connection plan in about four minutes. The pull happened, the connection happened, the test happened. By the time I was back from work the surface was patched and the inspector had signed. I could not tell, on Tuesday, that anyone had been digging on Monday." — L.W., Mariner Street, dossier RKT-DOS-141, 2024
§ V · Outside the shop
Dani is a competitive recreational diver; she certified through NAUI in 2017 and dives the Lake Erie and Lake Ontario wreck sites with a regional dive club. She is on the volunteer board of the Buffalo String Works, the El Sistema-inspired youth music program serving West Side and East Side students. She brings her younger brother (now a software engineer in Toronto) to the Buffalo Bills season opener every year, regardless of who they are playing or how cold it is.