Theron O. Adekunle, PE

§1Background

Theron Adekunle grew up in Lawrence Park, the unincorporated community east of Erie that grew around the General Electric Transportation Systems locomotive plant (now Wabtec). His father worked at GE Transportation for thirty-eight years; his mother taught third grade at Lawrence Park Elementary. He attended Penn State Behrend on a Pennsylvania Higher Education Foundation scholarship for the children of GE employees, graduating BSEE in 2003 with honors in the power-systems track.

The 2003 job market was tighter than the 2008 one Margaret Trzaska faced; Theron took the first offer that arrived, which was Bechtel’s industrial-power group in Frederick, MD, on the petroleum-refining side of the practice. He spent eleven years there. The work was substantial — large industrial single-line studies, switchgear specifications for refinery expansions, arc-flash incident-energy calculations under what was then the new 2002 edition of IEEE 1584 — and the firm was a good place to learn the work, with reviewers a year or two senior who would catch errors a junior was likely to make. Theron earned his Pennsylvania PE in 2009 by reciprocity from Maryland, his MS in EE from RIT in 2010 on a part-time program, and his IEEE IAS Senior Member grade in 2013.

By 2014 he was tired of the travel. Refinery work meant a flight every other week to Texas, Louisiana, or California, and the schedule was incompatible with a young family. He and his wife Patricia (a Mercyhurst-trained athletic trainer) had two daughters in Frederick, the elder one starting school, and the decision to move back to Erie was a return to family rather than a career choice. Theron contacted Margaret Trzaska on a recommendation from a mutual CMU classmate; she had been the firm’s sole engineer for six years and was at capacity. The hire was effective March 2015.

§2Practice focus

Within the firm, Adekunle is the lead engineer on R-02 (arc-flash incident reconstruction), R-03 (motor failure root cause analysis), and R-06 (grounding/bonding investigations). His Bechtel experience with refinery-scale industrial power equipment translates directly to the larger end of the Erie corridor’s installed base; he is the principal the firm dispatches to 4.16 kV and above matters and to any incident involving heavy industrial switchgear.

He wrote the firm’s standing IEEE 1584-2018 arc-flash calculation protocol — including the firm’s deliberate practice of recalculating every installed label against the 2018 edition rather than relying on the 2002-edition label most often found in the field. This single workflow decision has been the dispositive question on at least four arc-flash matters in the past three years, including CF-2025-104 featured this issue.

Adekunle’s bench work on R-03 motor-failure RCA is conducted from Bay 4’s overhead-crane-equipped disassembly area; he is the principal who actually performs the surge-comparison testing on the Doble M4100 and the polarization-index measurements on the Megger MIT525. His standing failure-mode taxonomy is documented at R-03 §2.

§3Testimony record

Qualified as an expert in electrical engineering, arc-flash incident reconstruction, and industrial-power engineering in the following jurisdictions:

• United States District Court for the Western District of Pennsylvania (Erie and Pittsburgh divisions) — WDPa. 8 admissions, 2016 – 2026.
• United States District Court for the Northern District of Ohio. 3 admissions, 2019 – 2025.
• United States District Court for the Middle District of Pennsylvania. 2 admissions, 2018 – 2024.
• Allegheny County Court of Common Pleas, Pennsylvania. 7 admissions, 2017 – 2026.
• Erie County CCP. 11 admissions, 2015 – 2026.
• Trumbull County CCP, Ohio. 3 admissions, 2020 – 2024.

31 depositions; 11 bench trials. One denied qualification at a federal Daubert hearing in 2020 — an arc-flash matter involving a pre-1996 NEMA-frame switchgear for which the available short-circuit current could not be independently verified to engineering certainty; the matter settled before retrial. Detail records on counsel request through Engage.

§4Signature investigations

• CF-2025-104 · Erie foundry arc-flash. Featured this issue. The working-distance reconstruction matter — see the dossier.
• CF-2024-171 · 13.8 kV switchgear arc-flash. WDPa matter; settled. The first 13.8 kV class incident the firm closed under R-02.
• CF-2023-019 · Sharon-area steel-mill DC motor failure. The motor was 1986 rewind; the failure traced to a 1991 rewind specification error that placed two extra turns on phase B during the rewind, increasing thermal stress on that winding for thirty-two years before catastrophic failure.
• CF-2021-058 · 480 V switchgear flashover at a pharmaceutical packaging plant. The firm’s most-cited R-02 matter in formal publications; presented at IEEE IAS PCIC 2022.
• CF-2018-104 · Steelworkers’ arc-flash incident in Ashtabula. Three-worker injury matter that settled within ninety days of the sealed report.

§5References