A week after Hurricane Michael tore across the Florida Panhandle in October 2018, Tim Pilcher of Schweitzer Engineering Laboratories (SEL) hand-delivered a blue box to the storm-ravaged town of Mexico Beach. Then, crouched inside a lopsided metal shed surrounded by strewn sand and broken tree branches, he helped install it.
Pilcher, an application engineer based in SEL’s Dothan, Alabama, office, performed an emergency retrofit on the town’s storm-ravaged water and wastewater system. Before long, the small seaside community—ground zero of the hurricane’s destruction—had a temporary way of safely pumping sewage to a facility where it could be treated and stored.
“Tim didn’t drive to Mexico Beach to make money off a disaster,” said Marcus Mitchell, instrumentation control electrical technician with Gainesville Regional Utilities in Florida. “He came to help.”
Mitchell, who had been doing business with Pilcher for six years, said he knew he could count on him. That’s why he placed the urgent call to him on a Sunday morning.
“’It’s bad here—like a bomb went off,” he told Pilcher.
Mitchell had been dispatched to Mexico Beach as a volunteer with FlaWARN—a Florida water and wastewater network that sends member-utility workers to assist other utilities in disaster-stricken areas.
“We need your help. How soon can you get here?” he asked Pilcher.
Hurricane Michael had obliterated entire blocks of houses and tossed cars and boats about like toys. What’s more, it toppled the town’s water tower and destroyed its main wastewater lift station. Not only was there no electricity or fresh water, but untreated sewage had nowhere to go.
Our aim is to mitigate the effects by helping shorten the duration of power outages and get critical infrastructures back up and running,” Bridges explained. “We give customers ‘disaster discounts’ on necessary products, and we expedite deliveries. We also mobilize our employees to be on call for technical support.
“With the main lift station down, no wastewater could be pumped out of the community,” said Mitchell. Consequently, raw sewage could potentially be released and pose a serious environmental and human health threat, he said.
The lift station needed a quick—but reliable—repair. “I trusted Tim to provide the expertise and the resources to pull it off,” said Mitchell.
SEL has a long history of jumping into action in the wake of massive natural disasters, including Hurricanes Michael in Florida, Harvey in Texas, and Katrina in Louisiana and the Joplin Tornado in Missouri, said Todd Bridges, SEL’s vice president of sales and customer service.
“It’s in our DNA of service to help,” he said.
Even when well planned for, big storms can deliver devastating blows to communities, knocking out electricity and critical infrastructures that include water and wastewater facilities.
“Our aim is to mitigate the effects by helping shorten the duration of power outages and get critical infrastructures back up and running,” Bridges explained. “We give customers ‘disaster discounts’ on necessary products, and we expedite deliveries. We also mobilize our employees to be on call for technical support.”
SEL often donates funds to the American Red Cross as well, he added.
And sometimes SEL takes a boots-on-the-ground approach, just as Pilcher did after Hurricane Michael. The morning after Mitchell called him, he got in his car and drove two hours to Mexico Beach with a blue box in his trunk—the SEL-2411P Pump Automation Controller.
Stumps of trees lined the road leading to town, Pilcher recalled. Then he got stopped by the National Guard.
“They were only letting residents and utility members past the barricade,” he said. “I parked my car and called Marcus, and he drove me to the lift station.”
There, the two men wired a portable generator to the pump controller, which they mounted on plywood inside the lopsided shed.
When they turned the controller on, Mexico Beach’s main lift station worked once again.
“To say we were relieved would be an understatement,” said Pilcher. “I drove there to help a customer who was there to help an entire town.”
Though an emergency fix, almost a year later the pump controller continues to serve a town left with no water tower, gas station, or permanent police station.
“It’s still inside that shed, doing its job,” said Mitchell.