How a medical life-flight aircraft and a pressure seal from EGC saved an oil refinery from a big downtime loss.

The call came to EGC on Thursday, November 29 from Universal Plant Services (UPS), a project management, maintenance and repair service for the energy industry. They were doing maintenance at an oil re nery and couldn’t get a pressure seal for a Flowserve Edwards 14”, 2500# check valve. Without it, they knew the re nery would lose $4.5 million dollars per shift in downtime.

So, they called EGC Enterprises knowing that they could get a VSG Graphite pressure seal in a day. The order was placed at 5PM on November 29 and two graphite pressure seals were engineered and manufactured by early evening. But then, the trouble began. How would they get the pressure seal from Cleveland, Ohio to Houston, Texas for a 6AM CST installation on November 30? It would be a 24-hour drive for a hot shot driver and that just wasn’t fast enough.

So, UPS had their customer make a call to multiple carriers to see if they could make the delivery. When that didn’t work, EGC called Bob Rutherford, the company’s recently retired president. As a current pilot, Bob “knew some guys” who were at the lakefront airport. They were life-œ ight pilots who were responsible for taking human organs from one hospital to another and they could deliver the EGC pressure seals in plenty of time for the 6 AM startup.

“We don’t think there’s anyone better than EGC at engineering and manufacturing a pressure seal in a single day,” says Thom Jessup, Fluid Sealing Sales Manager for EGC. “But when you leave the airport in Cleveland at 11:30 PM and the plane arrives in Houston at 2:00 the next morning, that’s customer service!”