Thompson Pump Wins ENR Award for Puerto Rico Relief
Thompson Pump and Manufacturing Co. has won the 2019 Engineering News-Record (ENR) Award of Merit in the Water/Environment category for its work in Puerto Rico during the immediate aftermath of Hurricane Maria, which made landfall in September 2017.
In the weeks and months after their arrival in Puerto Rico, the Thompson Pump crew’s efforts helped save an entire community from a potentially catastrophic flood and provided safe drinking water to more than 200,000 people.
“It’s such an honor to be recognized for the work we did in Puerto Rico,” said Bobby Zitzka, Thompson Pump’s national sales manager. “The destruction we encountered was unimaginable. Without hesitation our team, both on the ground in Puerto Rico and home in Florida, immediately got to work to make sure we could do whatever was possible to help the people through this extremely challenging time.”
The sustained 150 mile-per-hour winds and 30-plus inches of rains left behind by Hurricane Maria caused a shocking path of destruction. The selfless efforts by Thompson’s employees and the company’s high-quality equipment were literally life-saving.
A team of 13 Thompson Pump workers arrived in Puerto Rico soon after the storm and got to work. One of their first tasks was formulating a strategy to help save a large community of residents living downstream from the Guajataca Dam. The dam’s spillway failed during the hurricane, causing an outpouring of water that brought about major erosion, necessitating the evacuation of 70,000 area homes. Conditions were so dire that, during and immediately after the storm, there was a real fear they could lose the dam entirely.
As Thompson Pump lowered the dam’s water level, thus alleviating the possibility of major flooding, U.S. Army Corps of Engineers officials realized Thompson’s workers and equipment could be utilized for yet another vital purpose – providing drinking water for almost a quarter of a million people desperate for it.
Thompson Pump employees look back upon their time in Puerto Rico as an unforgettable experience; the devastation left behind by the storm, the resilience and gratitude of the local citizens, and the satisfaction of knowing they played a part in positively impacting thousands of lives.
Thompson Pump and Manufacturing Co., a 49-year-old family-owned company, is a full-service manufacturer and provider of high-quality pumps, pumping equipment and engineering expertise for bypass pumping, dewatering, mining and flood control.
About the Author
Michael Roth
Editor
Michael Roth has covered the equipment rental industry full time for RER since 1989 and has served as the magazine’s editor in chief since 1994. He has nearly 30 years experience as a professional journalist. Roth has visited hundreds of rental centers and industry manufacturers, written hundreds of feature stories for RER and thousands of news stories for the magazine and its electronic newsletter RER Reports. Roth has interviewed leading executives for most of the industry’s largest rental companies and manufacturers as well as hundreds of smaller independent companies. He has visited with and reported on rental companies and manufacturers in Europe, Central America and Asia as well as Mexico, Canada and the United States. Roth was co-founder of RER Reports, the industry’s first weekly newsletter, which began as a fax newsletter in 1996, and later became an online newsletter. Roth has spoken at conventions sponsored by the American Rental Association, Associated Equipment Distributors, California Rental Association and other industry events and has spoken before industry groups in several countries. He lives and works in Los Angeles when he’s not traveling to cover industry events.