The pump business can be an adventure

You might assume that manufacturing pumps is a boring business: an industrial career devoid of danger, passion, and international intrigue. You will be wrong.

When storms hit and sewers burst, when crops withered and drinking water ran out, people often turned to the pump industry for help. And the people who make and supply those pumps – at least at South Florida-based Moving Water Industry – have traveled the world from the rain-soaked streets of Bangkok to the fields. Barley brewing in Mexico.

Working in Florida can be equally bizarre, sometimes involving alligators and other dangerous creatures.

Just ask Ron Dhaveloose, a 63-year-old with a raspy laugh, a Hulk Hogan-style mustache and 46 years of experience building, installing and maintaining pumps. He currently works at MWI’s Deerfield Beach plant but he has been a pumper for a long time.

Beginning in the 1970s, Dhaveloose was a welder and diver for a Pompano Beach-based manufacturer called Farmers Pump. In addition to carefully crafting the pump impeller, Dhaveloose is the person the customer calls when the pump gets clogged and someone has to jump into the canal to clear the blockage.

Since many of Farmer’s customers are farmers, that often means swimming through the rural canals at the edge of the Everglades. Pumps in those areas could be clogged with plant debris, an unfortunate turtle that swam into the intake valve and got stuck, or a hungry alligator that followed the unfortunate turtle and got trapped as well. Whatever it was, Dhaveloose had to pull it out.

“We didn’t have wetsuits back then,” he recalls. “We wore straight-leg jeans and tennis shoes, we grabbed our pipes and went down.”

The hookah rig is a kind of diving equipment. The diver exhales from a long tube connected to an air compressor, usually on a boat or floating on the water.

In the case of Dhaveloose, the air duct acts as a communication device. Whenever too many crocodiles swam towards him while he was in the water to unclog the pump, his diving buddy in the upper boat would hit the air duct with a stick to let him out. She knew it might be time to get back on the boat. .

“I came and got six [alligators] right there,” said Dhaveloose. “I had them ripping off my hose, taking off my mask. I let them take the tool out of my hand.”

Snakes are another danger. Dhaveloose claims he has been bitten by a rattlesnake twice and twice by a rattlesnake, and has never been to a hospital for treatment for the venom. But he says there is an upside to all the poison that has passed through his veins:

“To this day, mosquitoes wouldn’t hear me,” he said. “They were like, ‘If we bite this guy, we’ll die!'”

Working in 70 countries

It’s not an alligator but an 8-foot wooden giraffe statue inside MWI’s Deerfield Beach headquarters, one of the few that hints at the globally adventurous side of the business. pump business. It was a souvenir from former company president David Eller’s trip to sell pumps in Zimbabwe.

MWI has sold pumps throughout the US and 70 other countries. The company pumped emergency drinking water from the Nile in Egypt, helped drain New Orleans in the wake of Hurricane Katrina, sped up sluggish canals in Bangkok, built pumps to power salmon. in the Pacific Northwest, while also irrigating the hops and barley used to make Corona Beer in Mexico.

The company attracted some notoriety in the 1990s because of one of these international business deals, involving Jeb Bush before he became governor of Florida, the Nigerian government, an $80 million loan from the Export-Import Bank of the United States and allegations of bribery and peddling. . US courts cleared MWI of any wrongdoing in 2017, after 18 years of federal investigations and litigation that tarnished the company’s image and were periodically raised during election campaigns. Bush’s election.

“It’s a great burden for any Small Business Dana Eller, who is now guiding MWI through the biggest expansion in the company’s history, said.

Eller is MWI’s fourth generation family owner, which can trace its history back to 1924, and his pride in the company’s success runs deep. As a child, he dreamed of building pumps. Really.

Dana’s great-grandfather, Hoyt Eller, came down from Alabama to work as a carpenter on the construction of the Boca Raton Hotel. After the hotel opened in 1926, Hoyt used the money he earned to buy farmland in Deerfield Beach, open a small machine shop and a gas station.

Hoyt’s son, Marlin, did not have much farm work. He sold his father’s land, but expanded the machine shop into a company called M&W Ironworks, which sold pumps and other machinery to South Florida farmers. Marlin and his son, David, patented about 20 new pump designs, renamed the company “Moving Water Industries” and expanded the business internationally.

After all its colorful history, the business has barely passed down to Dana Eller. In 1979, when Dana was eight years old, his father David told him he was thinking of selling the business.

“I started crying and said I wanted to build pumps like my dad,” Eller said. “8-year-olds often don’t know what they want to do, but I guess God put that in my heart when I was eight. That’s what I wanted to do.”

The second grader made a deal with his father. If young Dana worked in the factory every day after school, learned how to operate all the machines and studied engineering in college, David vowed that one day he would give him the keys to the business. . Dana earned her engineering degree from UF in 1995 and was appointed president in 2012.

“He gave me the keys,” Dana said. “And I still love doing it.”

Dana now runs the business with her siblings Daren and Danielle. His son, Hoyt, started working full-time as a factory mechanic last year.

A ‘hands-on business’

Meanwhile, although Ron Dhaveloose continues to run the pump business, his diving days are over. Eight years ago, at the age of 55, he did his last dive in the Gulf of Louisiana and decided he was too old to continue in the water. “That’s what I miss the most,” he said wistfully.

He also doesn’t weld as much as before. Although he built thousands of pump impellers in his four and a half decades of work, arthritis limited his ability to make the careful, precise welds needed to join the metal impellers. together to form pump impellers.

“This is still a hands-on business,” he said. Whether the propeller comes out correctly or not is due to the skill and stability of the worker holding the torch.

Currently, Dhaveloose is a quality control inspector at MWI, which acquired Farmers Pump in 2019. Dana Eller says he’s happy to have him around to mentor younger workers. —including his son Hoyt. “We don’t have a retirement age,” he said. “As long as someone can contribute, pass on knowledge and train the next generation, they can keep working.”

For his part, Dhaveloose doesn’t know what he’ll do if he retires. He could use his captain’s degree to run rental boats, spend more time with the jalapeños growing in his garden, or concoct even better holiday decorations. more complex to display in his front yard.

But more than anything, he wanted to build pumps.

“I’m one of those stubborn people,” he said. “I’ll keep working or I’ll die, one or the other.”

Miami Ambassador 2022.
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