Business View Magazine | July 2020

103 BUSINESS VIEW MAGAZINE JULY 2020 PROGRESS I VE P I PEL INE MANAGEMENT technology as something we wanted to continue to grow in the U.S. market. We formed PPM in August 2002 and in September we started working on our first project. Fast forward 18 years, we have a million feet of line in the ground in 18 states and it continues to evolve day by day.” BVM: What areas do you service and are your employees trained inhouse? Wickersham: “Our main facility is in Winona, New Jersey. Our newest facility is on Long Island in Deer Park, New York to service our clients in NY city and a stepping point up to New England. Our big footprint for projects is from Washington, D.C. to Baltimore, Philadelphia and out to Chicago with a high concentration in northern New Jersey, Brooklyn, Queens, and Boston. We also provide UV cured fiberglass liners for sanitary sewer and storm sewer, and some process water lines. With the Starline technology it’s almost exclusively natural gas distribution pipeline. Over the last decade, the of our conversation. BVM: Can you give us the background history on Progressive Pipeline Management? Wickersham: “There was an existing technology for lining or rehabilitating natural gas mains and a company out of Germany called Excelon had the technology license. I first saw it in 2001 in Philadelphia. A year later, Excelon decided to give up the license and called me to see if I was interested. I in turn had talked to George and other gas utility pipeline operators to ask if there was a future in the lining technology and they emphatically said “yes”. “So we negotiated a new license with the German manufacturer and patent holder, Karl Weiss, which is a 120-year-old subsurface engineering company out of Berlin. I was a contractor working for gas utilities for 10 years previously, focusing on PCB contamination, robotics, and pipeline cleaning. So it was a natural extension for me to look at this