Now where does CH Bull Company fit into the picture of the rental equipment industry?
In the early 1950’s C. H. Bull was becoming a distributor of different hydraulics jacks and hydraulic systems. Many times jacks were needed to do just one job and the contractor would say to himself, “What the heck am I going to do with this after the job is done?” The second generation owners of C. H. Bull Charles Bull and Harry Sheppard heard this more than once and said “Let’s start renting the jacks and equipment.”
With C. H. Bull in downtown San Francisco they heard about a new form of transportation called BART. BART was going to go right through the middle of San Francisco. They were going to be digging right under Market Street.
They were going to need to support the buildings that lined Market Street and contractors needed jacks. C. H. Bull’s rental fleet of hydraulic jacks started to grow quickly. You can say that the construction of the BART system is what helped put C. H. Bull on the map as a go to company for high tonnage high pressure jacking systems. Some of our early customers were CalTrans, Bechtel, Bigge and many of the other contractors in the early phase of BART construction.
We were literally shaken by another big event in the history of our rental of jacking systems. It happened at 5:04PM October 17, 1989. We won’t soon forget the Loma Prieta earthquake. 100’s of homes that survived the initial quake had to be lifted so new foundations could be poured and the homes lowered back and secured to the foundation. We supplied literally 100’s of jacking systems to contractors for this.
The images of the Bay Bridge and the Cyprus Freeway will never be forgotten. C. H. Bull supplied literally 1000’s of tons of jacking capacity to fix the Bay Bridge and to do testing on the Cypress Freeway.
Once again C. H. Bull was involved by supplying 1000’s of tons of jacking force to help build the new Bay Bridge.
Due to the heavy rains in the winter of 2016 and the spring of 2017 a bridge on one of the most beautiful sections of highway in the country, Highway 1 going through Big Sur, crumbled. Tens of Thousands of people have not been able to drive this beautiful road this summer but C. H. Bull is supplying almost 2,000 tons of jacking force out of our rental pool of jacking systems is doing our part to get this fixed.
We have continued to take a systems approach to solving our customer’s problems creating one of the largest fleets of rental hydraulic jacks and jacking equipment in the country.
If you need high tonnage jacks for a job in the Western United States we have the inventory, we have the experience, we have the expertise, and we have what you need to help mend and repair the infrastructure of the roads and bridges in this great country.