A Thanksgiving Day Pressure Seal delivery made all the difference for Industrial Valve and South Mississippi Electric Power.

Industrial Valve Sales and Service of Mobile, Alabama does valve repairs for a host of power generation, refining, and pulp and paper plant facilities. During the week of Thanksgiving, they were doing routine maintenance during a plant outage at South Mississippi Electric Power Association in Moselle, MS.

One task, among many, was to change out a pressure seal on a 3”, 1,500 lb. class globe valve in a steam service application. The valve was upstream taking fresh water to the boiler. A replacement metal seal from the OEM would have taken a minimum of two weeks or they could pay an expedite fee and get it in a week and a half. But Industrial Valve hadn’t that much time. Instead, they called EGC Enterprises in Cleveland, Ohio knowing they could get a graphite pressure seal as soon as the next day.

The order was placed with EGC on Wednesday, the day before Thanksgiving and scheduled for delivery the following Monday. But soon after, the plant decided to bring the boiler up ahead of schedule and needed the pressure seal installed shortly after 6:00 AM on Saturday. So EGC and Industrial Valve had to get busy.

Mitch Sahadi, EGC’s Manufacturing/Inventory Manager, got the emergency call Friday morning. “We had to engineer the seal, manufacture it and have it arrive in Moselle in less than 24 hours, and that included the 12-hour drive to get it there,” said Sahadi. A “hot-shot”, or expedited driver, arrived at EGC and left with the pressure seal at about 3:00 PM. He arrived safely in Moselle by 6AM the next morning.

Industrial Valve was able to complete the installation for South Mississippi Electric Power. Stu Padgett, Purchasing Manager for Industrial Valve, says “we use a great deal of graphite in all that we do. Graphite seals most cavity imperfections so we seldom need to re-machine the valve surface and that’s a tremendous savings. Our expectations were met, the customer service was fabulous and the hot-shot driver got here right on-the-dot at 6AM.”

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