Business at its best: Colorado's top companies take a bow.

CH2M Hill has undertaken engineering and construction projects all over the world, and as close to home as Rocky Flats, which it has been entrusted to clean up. But the project closest to company Chairman Ralph Peterson's heart was neither his company's biggest nor most profitable.

It was a project that brought running water to people in an old section of Cairo, Egypt, for the first time. "I remember being out on one of the reservoir sites, kind of up on a little hill overlooking a very old part of Cairo, and realizing hundreds of thousands of people were going to have something that they'd never had before that we take for granted, which is running water in your house," says Peterson, the chairman, president and CEO of CH2M Hill.

"To me it was a very moving experience. I thought, 'You know, we really do some neat stuff that helps people out.' That was by no means the largest or most complex project, but there was something about that realization that was a personally moving experience...

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