Business View Magazine | July 2019

33 BUSINESS VIEW MAGAZINE JULY 2019 things you ever saw. Now, in Mississippi, we have B&D Plastics, which is a sister company. At that facility, we build fiberglass and dual laminate tanks – that’s a tank which has a highly resistant liner inside, which could be PVC, Teflon - any number of things. And then they’re wrapped in fiberglass for strength. All of the locations have achieved the RTP-1 stamp authorization rating, which is the highest you can get in the ASME. B&D has the RTP-1 rating both for straight fiberglass and for dual laminates, and the last time I checked, there was only one other company in the United States that had it. So, that’s a pretty good thing to have. We also have a unit down in Mississippi, AFC South, which is a direct part of Augusta Fiberglass, where they build the larger fiberglass vessels that are going to be shipped west.” Harte is adamant that innovation is what gives Augusta Fiberglass its competitive edge. “We have been very persistent in doing things that other people are either afraid to do, or don’t have the engineering skill to do,” he declares. “An example: the Tampa Electric Company in Florida had a plant, which had an entire system of very large ducts – 20 feet in diameter, running throughout a four- story building - that was all made with metal, and it had deteriorated and was, essentially, almost unusable; and it was becoming dangerous because it was rusted through. So, they put that out for bid; very few people in the industry looked at it, or even understood what had to be done. Well, we bid it; we took on everything, including the removal of the metal structures that were there, which is not actually what we do, but we partnered with another company and we came in there with them, so that we could be sure that what they did, left us with what we needed to put in. Now, the duct was so large, you couldn’t bring it across the road without a great deal of problems. So, we went to our plant at B&D in Ocean Springs, and we acquired a dock in the river that flows out into the Gulf of Mexico. We modified the dock, so that these big ocean-going barges could come in and we loaded everything we needed onto those barges from the dock, and shipped them across the Gulf of Mexico to Tampa, where they were offloaded and put where the plant needed them. That project AUGUSTA F I BERGLASS