“Visitors don’t always respect our local plumbing,” Ford says. “They pour or flush anything they want down the drains. Stuff poured or flushed on upper floors blocks lower-floor drainage, requiring regular sanitary sewer pipe cleaning.”
Ford’s company handles the challenges with a staff of 14, including 10 field technicians. They are well equipped with 10 service vans outfitted with push camera systems and drain machines, and with four trailer-mounted waterjetters ready for service anywhere in the three-county service area.
A diverse region
Farmers and fishermen were the first settlers of quaint towns on the region’s pine and palmetto scrub land along the Gulf. Today, those communities are among the fastest growing in the nation, popular with tourists and retirees.
Roto-Rooter of Lee County serves a narrow and increasingly crowded sliver coastal land. To the west are the Gulf and its beaches; to the east the swamps and sawgrass prairies of the Big Cypress National Preserve and Everglades National Park, plus several Indian reservations and wildlife refuges.
The three counties rise only a few feet above sea level and have practically no natural gravity flow in their sanitary and storm sewer pipes. Flooding from hurricanes and other storms regularly clogs these pipes with debris, and so does the carelessness of tourists and winter residents from the north.
The company’s service area takes in several wealthy enclaves, including Boca Grande Island; Sanibel and Captiva islands, accommodating 15,500 visitors during an average winter week; and Naples, of the nation’s wealthiest cities. Residents of more modest means dwell elsewhere on the coast. The three counties had a total population of 833,892 in 2000.
Growing fast
Ford came to the Gulf Coast in 1990 to escape New York’s brutal winters. “Right out of trade school, for 10 years I belonged to New York Plumbers Local #1, serving Brooklyn and Queens,” he says. “I earned my master plumber license in Florida and founded my company here on July 1, 1993.”
In its first year, the company generated $250,000 in revenue. “Last year we did $1.8 million with 10 trucks and 10 technicians,” says Ford. “We regularly have three of our technicians in Rotor-Rooter’s 25 top national technicians. We’re accustomed to resolving difficult situations with inventive solutions. Locally, we have a very high water table. Often we have to adapt tools to get the job done. For anything really unusual, I assist my technicians.”
One storm drain job in Fort Myers required cleaning and video inspection of a 36-inch pipe half filled with water. “Jessie Martin, one of our award-wining technicians, wrapped a camera in his 5-year-old son Jeremiah’s water wings and floated it down the pipe,” Ford recalls.
Ford and his technicians often work in properties on sand dunes where people should not have been allowed to build. “There is very little pitch, and pipes clog after a bad rain,” he says. “Over 60 years ago, when construction began here, old pipes of clay, cast iron, and Orangeburg were used in our swampy terrain. Roots easily penetrate these pipes.”
Training for safety
Ford puts all new hires through a standard 8-week training program. They ride with different technicians to get accustomed to the area and learn work procedures and safe use of equipment. A mandatory monthly meeting is held on a variety of issues, including use of personal protective equipment and dealing with mosquitoes and fire ants.
“The average residential sewer is 75 to 100 feet long, with multiple blockages per job,” Ford says. “We constantly train for confined-space working conditions. Most manholes here are below sea level, and we have many lift stations. With our new Vactor combination truck, we are exploring alternate ways to maintain manholes and sanitary sewer lines.”
Ford believes he has the only privately owned Vactor in the area. He does most of the work involving that truck, handles other big and difficult jobs, and spends the rest of his time training his staff in his methods and techniques.
The trainees experience a variety of unforeseen scenarios. “Many of the condominiums we service have garbage disposals,” Ford says. “People put everything imaginable down them, including orange and grapefruit pulp, which smells nice but stuffs up the drains. To protect my employees, they often wear rubber surgical gloves under heavy canvas work gloves. All of our trucks carry surgical gloves, and each man has his own safety shoes and hard hat.
“To our largely senior citizen client base, we compare stuffed lateral pipes to hardening of the arteries. When we jet out lines, anything including cooking grease does not stand a chance. Everything runs out. Grease-clogged sanitary sewer lines are especially common during major holidays when seniors get together with their families and cook. When they are done cooking and start to clean up, they pour everything down the kitchen pipes. We are constantly amazed at what we find stuck in pipes and what we have to do to inspect and repair them.”
Capable staff
Ford gives abundant credit to his four-member office staff. “They stay in touch with multi-family housing projects, resort condominiums, and timeshare properties, and keep key decision-makers informed about what needs to be done to keep their sanitary sewer pipes open and flowing,” Ford says. “We have hundreds of maintenance contracts with tourist accommodations and senior-living centers where there is a tendency to abuse the plumbing.”
Besides grease, sand is a major source of blocked pipes in tourist and beach areas. Sanibel Island has one of the world’s best shelling beaches. Even though beachfront sinks are available, visitors wash shells in their hotel bathrooms or timeshare kitchens, sending sand and bits of shell down the drains. Instead of using outdoor showers to remove sand from their bodies, people shower indoors.
In addition to its private-sector work, Roto-Rooter of Lee County Inc. provides emergency drain-cleaning services for municipalities, school systems, hospitals, and utilities. “The Charlotte County school system had a broken cable caught in their sanitary sewer line,” says Ford. “They tried to unstick the line, and ended up losing their cable.
“They were afraid they were going to have to dig up the line. We were able to hook onto their cable with a cable retriever, which raps around a cable and binds to it so the technician can pull both lines out. We retrieved the cable without any cosmetic damage, and then we cleared the line.” Ford personally handled the job, which took about two hours.
Ford says the continuing success of his business depends on growth in local communities and on its corporate affiliation. “We benefit from the Roto-Rooter name and quality,” he notes. “It’s familiar to residents who are new to our area and need the service we provide.”
