Pirtek Kent<\/a>, which provides mobile hydraulic and other high-pressure hose repair service to the marine, construction and trucking industries, had an urgent message for McDaniel, a service technician. They needed him to take a new hose to the ship.<\/p>\n<\/p>\n“When I first got the call from Erin she was trying to explain the dangling lifeboat on a ship,” McDaniel said as he retold the story about his April Fool’s night and the 10:30 p.m. call. “I thought about how I’d have to climb out to the lifeboat. I thought it was an April Fool’s joke.”<\/p>\n<\/p>\n
The Gilliam’s had pulled a few April Fool’s Day jokes on their technicians earlier in the day. In fact, when they received a late-night call from Singapore, they expected an employee attempted to get them back with their own joke.<\/p>\n<\/p>\n
“The call came in from Singapore and my husband thought he was joking,” Erin Gilliam said. “We average 10 to 12 jobs a day but all are local calls. He (her husband) was kind of laughing and handed me the phone.<\/p>\n<\/p>\n
“I started talking to the guy and began thinking this was not one of our technicians. I started to take information and he wanted to shoot an email of failed hose (so Pirtek could make one). He said it was very urgent.”<\/p>\n<\/p>\n
Singapore-based ISM Ship Management Co. had the Korean Lily ship coming into the Port of Seattle from Alaska when a lifeboat operational test failed because of a blown hydraulic hose.<\/p>\n<\/p>\n
“The lifeboat was dangling, so they couldn’t come to port,” Gilliam said.<\/p>\n<\/p>\n
Gilliam said a technician normally inspects and makes a hose on site, but the shipping crew gave specifications of the hose, so Pirtek made it ahead of time.<\/p>\n<\/p>\n
The crew anchored the large ship in Elliott Bay on its way to Harbor Island to drop off a load of grain early in the morning. The crew lined up a transport boat through Arrow Marine Services to transport McDaniel to the ship after he drove his mobile van from his Edmonds home to the Seattle passenger dock.<\/p>\n<\/p>\n
It took about 30 minutes for the transport boat to reach the ship.<\/p>\n<\/p>\n
“I could see it stuck,” McDaniel said about the lifeboat. “If it fell, it’d go into the water.”<\/p>\n<\/p>\n
McDaniel had to jump from the transport boat to stairs on side of the ship.<\/p>\n<\/p>\n
“Then they hauled my tools up with a rope and I went up a 20-foot ladder to fix the hose,” McDaniel said. “It took 20 minutes to fix it and 20 minutes to get paid.”<\/p>\n<\/p>\n
The crew showed plenty of praise for McDaniel, who had the job done by midnight.<\/p>\n<\/p>\n
“I was like the superhero,” McDaniel said. “They were patting me on the back.”<\/p>\n<\/p>\n
The ship flew a Panama flag. It had a Korean captain and mainly Filipino crew. About 15 people were on deck when McDaniel arrived.<\/p>\n<\/p>\n
“They were super nice guys,” McDaniel said. “The captain and chief engineer took me into this room and paid in cash.”<\/p>\n<\/p>\n
The hose cost $150 and the crew had to pay an after-hours service charge.<\/p>\n<\/p>\n
“They were in panic mode,” McDaniel said. “They attempted to fix the hose, a 5,000 PSI (pounds of force per square inch) high pressure hose, but it didn’t work. They hit the lever and it popped.”<\/p>\n<\/p>\n
McDaniel looks back proudly about the call.<\/p>\n<\/p>\n
“This was definitely the funnest job I’ve had to date,” said McDaniel, who started in December with Pirtek.<\/p>\n<\/p>\n
The Gilliam’s opened Pirtek Kent in 2006. Erin Gilliam’s parents are part-owners. The center employs 10 and has five service trucks. It provides 24-hour service. Florida-based Pirtek features about 50 service centers across the nation. Woodinville is the only other location in Washington.<\/p>\n<\/p>\n
Kent Pirtek also does work for the U.S. Coast Guard, recently replacing about 300 hoses on the icebreaker Healey in Seattle.<\/p>\n<\/p>\n
“We work on car haulers, dump trucks, anything with a hose we’ll come and fix,” McDaniel said.<\/p>\n<\/p>\n
Even a large ship stuck in Elliott Bay.<\/p>\n<\/p>\n
“Maybe our next move will be mobile tugboat response,” said Erin Gilliam, whose company also has responded to cruise ships, barges and fishing vessels.<\/p><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Steve McDaniel had his doubts about a late-night call from his boss to respond to a stalled bulk carrier ship in Elliott Bay.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":212,"featured_media":17169,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5],"tags":[],"yst_prominent_words":[],"class_list":["post-17168","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-business"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kentreporter.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17168"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kentreporter.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kentreporter.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kentreporter.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/212"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kentreporter.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=17168"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.kentreporter.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17168\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kentreporter.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/17169"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kentreporter.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=17168"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kentreporter.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=17168"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kentreporter.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=17168"},{"taxonomy":"yst_prominent_words","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kentreporter.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/yst_prominent_words?post=17168"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}