Published September 2007

The Problem Solvers

By Mary Shafer (page 54)

Florida’s Gaffin Industrial Services develops innovative solutions to grow the business with vac-loading and waterblasting clients.

Capitalism in its best sense is the evolution of products and services to fill a market need, and Gaffin Industrial Services Inc. is a classic example of the way it’s supposed to work.

Leveraging the collective brainpower of long-term employees to take on increasingly difficult plant-cleaning challenges, Gaffin continues to stretch the boundaries of possibility in industrial services.

The company takes an aggressive stance on problem-solving, field safety and development of innovative tools and processes. Vice president and technical director Dan McCleary shares the story of how Gaffin has met challenges and built the business over 30 years.

“Our area is the phosphate capital of the country,” says McCleary. Riverview gets its name from the nearby Alafia River. “Alafia” means “river of fire,” so named by the original Seminole inhabitants because of the streaks of light that can still be seen in its water at night. By the 1890s, that phenomenon’s source — phosphate — was discovered in the adjacent land, and mining operations soon began. To this day, the area blooms with mining and processing facilities for the popular fertilizer component.

Other mills and plants also grew up around the phosphate industry, and a young George Gaffin moved to the area in 1978. He’d cut his teeth in industrial vacuum loading and high-pressure cleaning in Alabama and was ready to strike out on his own. Later, children Mark Gaffin and Deborah Gaffin joined the company and have since become full partners.

When McCleary joined the firm in 1983, it was running two NLB Corp. waterblaster trailers and a 1974 Supersucker vacuum truck from Super Products. Four years later, the company bought its first NLB truck, and has purchased new pumps just about every year since. It boasts a current fleet of two GapVax 5700 vacuum trucks with a 17-yard capacity and a blow-off system, a Guzzler 13-yard stainless container, 11 NLB 10250 10,000-psi waterblaster trucks, and one NLB 20250 20,000-psi truck, which has been partially converted with Jetstream UNx heads.

Natural evolution

Gaffin specializes in 10,000- to 20,000-psi industrial waterblasting and high-volume vacuum services. They’ve gained extensive experience servicing power, chemical and food service plants, and even a few theme parks, where their wet environment services are used to clean sumps, water lines, and the ponds and lakes that comprise quasi-natural wildlife exhibits.

“There’s just a lot of work for blasters here,” says McCleary. “Along with the processing and power plants, we take care of scrubber systems, reactors, various pipelines and vessels in the phosphate mines. We also clean boilers at garbage incinerators. Since a lot of the vac jobs come hand-in-hand with waterblasting, we’ve always done both in coalition. Our company evolved along the lines of our market’s needs.”

McCleary says Gaffin’s success is due to the knowledge and experience of its staff. “We have a pretty good team of experienced people. Most of them have been with the company 10-15 years. We’re very innovative, and our productivity is high because of our experienced personnel. With any company, your people are really what you have to offer. No matter how good your technology is, if your people don’t have the knowledge and experience to operate it right, you’re not going to succeed.”

Despite a significant core of veteran employees, Gaffin shares the industry’s overall need to attract and retain qualified new personnel. “Most of the people who do waterblasting tend to stay in the industry,” says McCleary, “so I’ll look for experience, and we have our own training. We look for those who are responsible and motivated. For safety reasons, they don’t touch anything high-pressure for six months, while we do shop training and then on-the-job. The new guy will act as hole attendant, watching and learning.”

Gaffin protects employees (and its customers) with stringent safety measures. With advice from safety consultants and worker compensation experts, it developed a comprehensive employee safety program monitored by its safety manager. Each employee is required to complete a dozen in-house safety programs, including confined space entry, hazard communications, hearing conservation, respiratory protection, equipment handling and general waterblast and vacuum safety.

The shop’s safety manager is fully trained and certified in Mine Safety and Health Administration and Occupational Safety and Health Administration compliance, along with all related points of waterblasting, and vacuum loading. Responsible for onsite safety monitoring, the safety manager verifies that a mandatory “tailgate safety meeting” is held daily before beginning work. This is done by reviewing a safety checklist included with each job ticket. This manager also meets with the onsite customer safety representative to review site rules and regulations, keeps up with safety innovations and maintains a strong relationship with the WaterJet Technology Association, of which Gaffin is a member.

A pioneer is born

Gaffin has pioneered techniques to service industrial plants while they remain online. The procedures were developed in response to specific challenges. When a problem arises, says McCleary, “We’ll all just sit down and engineer it out and come up with a solution.”

A good example of such spontaneous engineering is the process Gaffin developed to clean a single-loop scrubber at Tampa Electric. The crew needed to clean a 6-inch horizontal header with 4-foot-long, 4-inch-diameter drop pipes coming off of it. “Through the process of cleaning that header, we developed a nozzle that would turn those drop pipes down as we cleaned, so we could access them,” recalls McCleary.

“We eventually developed a method of performing this process while the plant remained online.”

Gaffin acquired a legal patent on the process, then went on to develop an online fan-cleaning procedure. “When we started doing online work, we realized that everybody’s problems are different. There’s lots of diversity in this vertical market, and we saw the opportunity there.

“Usually, the jobs we do while the plant remains online are all zero waste — nothing is allowed to hit the ground. We take the waste to whatever onsite locations — a wastewater sump or other appropriate facility — our customer provides. Our trucks aren’t DOT-certified, so we don’t haul the waste offsite, and we don’t work with hazardous materials. If the customer doesn’t have an on-location disposal site, we have to provide roll-off service through a third, DOT-certified party, and take it to a landfill or burner, depending on the material.”

Innovation opens doors

Though Gaffin’s primary market is the state of Florida, the online cleaning has increased demand throughout the United States for customers, including the Tennessee Valley Authority.

Generally, the firm’s reputation precedes it, eliminating the need for much marketing activity. “We have four salespeople, and sometimes they’ll go out and cold call,” says McCleary, “but a lot of times we get calls on referral, and those are mainly what they spend their time following up.”

In addition to designing their own processes, Gaffin sometimes acts as a beta-tester for new equipment from suppliers. “With new pieces of equipment, we’ll sometimes put the product to the test in the field, and evaluate it, just in the interest of furthering the industry.”

McCleary is bullish on the waterblasting and industrial vacuuming industry. “The applications are endless. We’re only touching a small percentage of them, and it’s surprising who needs us. We do a lot of work at Busch Gardens, vacuuming up hippo refuse and wildlife moats. We’ll take it to an onsite compost pile, which they recycle to fertilize their plantings.”

Recognizing that remaining environmentally friendly and compliant with the Environmental Protection Agency is key to their customers’ long-term viability — and therefore, their own — Gaffin is a member of Americans for Balanced Energy Choices, which advocates for cleaner energy processes, among other things. Gaffin understands that companies becoming EPA-compliant encourages a guaranteed revenue stream. “Phosphate jobs come and go for us,” McCleary says, “But there’s a lot of new construction going on to meet EPA requirements; that means more equipment for us to clean.”

Gaffin maintains a rational policy on its own growth. “We’ve got a good, large customer base, but we’re always looking for something different. We don’t want to put all our eggs in one basket, and we obviously want to expand the business. But our biggest goal right now is to cover all the services our existing customers want.”

McCleary says the bright future of the industry is due in no small part to contributions by equipment suppliers. “I think the biggest challenge is going to be dust suppression at power plants. Environmentally, everything has to be 100 percent picked up, and that’s the way of the future. Manufacturers are coming out with new equipment to help us do that all the time.”