Independence Excavating, Inc.

Independence Excavating is a heavy civil and site work contractor started by Sam DiGeronimo and his son Don in 1956, and now part of the DiGeronimo Companies. The firm self-performs excavation, demolition and decommissioning, environmental remediation, crushing and recycling, concrete and paving, and it primes work as well as subcontracting. Its project history reads as a list of Cleveland’s landmarks: excavation for the Justice Center Complex in 1972, the Gateway sports complex, the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, Cleveland Browns Stadium and Flats East Bank. The company works across Ohio, Pennsylvania and the Mid-Atlantic from offices in Brecksville, Cheswick, Pennsylvania and Sterling, Virginia. It is part of the CLE Connection Group team on the CLEvolution program at Cleveland Hopkins International Airport.

Sam DiGeronimo came to the United States from Abruzzi, Italy, in 1928. He and his son Don started the company in 1956 with a backhoe, a bulldozer, a truck and a handful of men. The business is now run by the third generation of the family, Rob, Vic and Kevin DiGeronimo, and sits inside the broader DiGeronimo Companies group.

Scale, in equipment terms: at peak operation the company fields over 1,000 people and owns more than 500 major pieces of construction equipment. Superintendents average more than 15 years with the firm.

The recycling side is easy to overlook and is one of the larger parts of the business. It began in 1977 and now runs four yards, three in Ohio and one in Pennsylvania, producing over four million tons of aggregate a year from concrete and asphalt taken off its own jobs and off other contractors’ jobs. That closes the loop on demolition work rather than sending it to landfill.

Recent work reaches well past northeast Ohio. Crews handled phased demolition and site preparation for the Stadium of the Future renovation in Jacksonville, Florida. The company converted the former Weirton Steel mill in West Virginia into a battery manufacturing campus for Form Energy and reports $2 million in cost savings on that job. Sister company Independence Demolition brought down DTE’s Trenton Channel Power Plant in Michigan alongside live utilities with no recordable injuries, clearing the site for what will be Michigan’s largest battery energy storage project. Other decommissioning work includes the coal-fired Martin Drake plant in downtown Colorado Springs, the Navajo Generating Station in Page, Arizona, and Homer City in Pennsylvania.

The firm was shortlisted for the 2026 World Demolition Awards.

Field operations run on GPS machine control and project management software, and the equipment fleet is turned over on a regular cycle rather than run to failure, which is a fair thing to ask about when comparing bids on mass excavation.