By Eric S. Smith, Journal Register News Service

WESTTOWN — When John McGreevy landed in Haiti on Jan. 4, he expected to see things he had never before experienced while in the impoverished nation. But his trip and the reason for going got completely flipped eight days later when a earthquake ripped through the Caribbean nation.

McGreevy, a 2006 West Chester Henderson graduate and the son of Bob and Pinky McGreevy, owners of C&W Mechanical Inc. in Pottstown, went to Haiti to do research on solar ovens and how they would affect women’s pulmonary health and daily routines there. As a senior at Elon University, McGreevy is an environmental studies and biology major with an interest in renewable sources of energy and using them in developing countries. He was also looking at ways to get clean water to Haitians.

“They have a big problem with parasites in their water,” McGreevy said during an interview Tuesday. “You see all these kids who are plump and you think they are well fed and healthy, but they really just have stomachs full of worms.”

McGreevy’s research was going well. But on a Tuesday afternoon, after spending a day working in bean fields with some local villagers in Layaye, which is about 70 miles outside of Port-au-Prince, he fell ill. He said he was preparing to lie down when he heard something that sounded like a jet engine.

“It was a very loud noise, and I felt the floor moving back and forth beneath me,” McGreevy said. “I immediately knew it was an earthquake. I thought back to elementary school about what to do in an earthquake. So I ran under the doorway and then ran outside.”

Fearing that something terrible had happened, McGreevy said, he ran into the streets and saw women doing laundry and acting as if nothing had happened. Most of the buildings in Layaye are made of thin wood or banana leaves, but McGreevy was in a church rectory, one of the few concrete buildings in the Haitian village.

“I tried to convince myself that it wasn’t an earthquake because no one else seemed to think so,” McGreevy said.

Only later in the day, after a friend in the village asked him how he was doing after the quake, did McGreevy know his initial feelings were correct. He said he immediately sent a text message to his mother: “There was a small earthquake, but I’m fine.”

“I knew if there was news of the earthquake in the United States, my mom would flip out,” McGreevy said.

His mother sent a message back informing him that a quake that registered a 7.3 on the Richter scale had hit Port-au-Prince. By then all of the phone lines in the village had gone down, but they still had Internet capabilities, so McGreevy was the first to inform the village of the disaster taking place just 70 miles away.

The priest in the village next began to find out just how bad the quake was from connections he had in the United States. He said he was asked by many to check on family members in Port-au-Prince, so he and McGreevy took the three-hour drive to the ravaged capital city just two days after the earthquake.

“I don’t want to say that I was scared, but it was a significant experience,” McGreevy said. “I saw things that I never thought I would see, and they happened to be some of the worst things going on in the world at the time.”

McGreevy and the priest found many of the people they were searching for, including the priest’s aunt and uncle and their two children who all were found dead in the rubble of their home.

The two travelers returned to Layaye later that night. And McGreevy thought about going back to Port-au-Prince.

“What I was doing in the village was not immediately significant,” McGreevy said. “Solar ovens don’t mean anything if the needs of the people aren’t being met.”

So he contacted the Matthew 25 House, a church organization in Port-au-Prince that provides housing for missionaries in the country. McGreevy said he knew about this organization because of his trip to Haiti a few years earlier.

As he drove into the city, many people banged on his car windows. “They thought because I was white that I had lots of money and food, and unfortunately I didn’t,” McGreevy said.

Before returning to Port-au-Prince, he stopped in the nearby city of Hinche and visited a hospital where he saw a room full of patients who had lost limbs and were being treated with basic pain pills. He said he had one tube of antibiotics that he gave to the hospital, but he could not provide any more help. He said medics there were performing amputations without anesthetics.

Just an hour after he arrived at the Matthew 25 House, a group from the Denver Children’s Hospital arrived with crates of medical supplies and instantly got to work. McGreevy unpacked their supplies and was helping doctors get proper medicine and supplies to do surgeries.

“I watched someone get a leg amputated above the knee on a kitchen table,” McGreevy said. “There were people cooking just a few feet away.”

The doctors from Denver chartered their own plane because they were told by the U.S. government that they could not go into Haiti, according to McGreevy.

In the days that followed, McGreevy became the de facto sanitation engineer in that part of the city because he had an outdoor survival background and a knowledge of digging latrines.

“The Haitian people helped me,” McGreevy said. “They immediately grabbed a shovel and wanted to help.”

He said they had a concert and parade put on by local people to help entertain the children.

“The people of Haiti are a very spiritual people,” McGreevy said. “Despite all of the horrible things that happened to them, they never lost their faith in God. They never had a ‘Why me?’ attitude.”

But after that came McGreevy’s most difficult job by far. He was sent to a local orphanage to pick up children and take them to the offices of the United Nations. “That was the hardest day of my life,” McGreevy said.

The orphanage housed 130 children but just four nannies. McGreevy and some nurses rode on a bus with 80 children and took a two-hour drive to the U.N. He said children were throwing up, urinating and defecating on the bus, yet they still kept singing spiritual songs.

When they had almost arrived, the U.N. called and said that the children could not come to the offices because some papers were not filled out.

“Because of some red tape, they turned the kids away,” McGreevy said. “I was very sad. I left on that note.”

The next day McGreevy boarded an Air Force cargo plane for a seven-hour flight to Orlando, Fla. He then flew from Orlando into Miami to catch his flight home.

While in Miami, McGreevy said, he saw a young girl who looked familar. He asked a woman with the girl if she was Haitian and if she was from an orphanage. The girl was one of the children whom McGreevy had helped from the orphanage and she had made it out of Haiti the next day.

“That was a great way to end the trip,” McGreevy said. “I thought about staying longer and even dropping out this semester. But I can be more help by starting things here that I’ve seen work, especially church-to-church connections. I see myself back there some day.”

McGreevy said the portrayal at times of the Haitian people in the United states has been wrong; they are not as violent as we are sometimes led to believe.

“I hope the American people get the right image of the Haitian people,” McGreevy said. “I hope this is not just another terrible thing that happened there but an awakening.”

He said there seemed to be more soldiers than humanitarian-aid workers and that many people who went to Haiti after the quake were there only for photo opportunities.

McGreevy said he saw a doctor who was not allowed to perform a surgery because pictures were being taken of former presidential candidate John Edwards handing out bottles of water.

“I’m not anti-American,” McGreevy said. The way they came up in the end was great, but some of the things they did frustrated me.”

Serving customers, employees and God

By Christie L. Chicoine
CS&T Staff Writer

POTTSTOWN — The business card of the mechanical contracting firm Bob McGreevy co-owns with wife Pinky says it all: “Bob McGreevy, P.E., Servant.”

“I serve the customers, I serve the employees and I serve God,” said McGreevy, who is a professional engineer and the company president.

C&W Mechanical, Inc., which the McGreevys purchased in March (2008), serves industrial and commercial clients in welding, pipefitting, millwright work and rigging as well as heating, ventilating and air-conditioning. In addition, the company provides design solutions and alternatives through green engineering.

McGreevy’s engineering background and his employees’ expertise collaboratively deliver engineered mechanical solutions. “We have quality, skilled craftsmen for industry,” he said. We’re combining that with green engineering to provide sustainable solutions to customers.”

McGreevy said he and Pinky operate their business on three basic principles. “We want our customers to feel their business is better because they do business with C&W. We want our employees to feel their quality of life is better because they work for C&W. We want C&W to grow and prosper.”

Pinky, the company’s vice-president, is in charge of the company’s payroll department and serves as the human resources director. “I love working with people,” she said. “I would hope by the end of the day that any of our employees or those customers we come in contact with would feel like we’re working together. We truly want to make a difference.”

Members of St. Maximilian Kolbe Parish in West Chester, the McGreevys are the parents of six: Matt, 22; John, 21; Tim, 19; twins Andrew and Luke, 17 and Meghan, 15. At St. Maximilian Kolbe, Bob and Pinky are extraordinary ministers of holy Communion and pre-Cana instructors and have also taught CCD.

Bob was co-chair of the building committee for St. Maximilian Kolbe’s School, which was completed in 2000. Last summer, after discovering a low-cost way to make the heating-only units in the classroom also cooling units, he donated his services in the installation of air-conditioning in the school’s classrooms.

Other clients include Lasko in West Chester, National Envelope in Exton, Fres-co System USA, Inc. in Telford and Sweet Street Desserts in Reading.

Pinky has also served on the parish’s welcoming committee. On Good Friday of each year, the entire McGreevy clan does general landscaping on unused property surrounding the parish.

The couple began a courtship after meeting in 1979 in Holy Family Church in Marietta, Ga., Archdiocese of Atlanta. For three months before they met, McGreevy had prayed to the Blessed Mother “to meet a wonderful woman and actually asked for freckles, red hair and blue eyes.”

His prayers were answered in Pinky, who is a natural redhead. “That night, I told my brother that I met the girl I was going to marry,” McGreevy said. They married two years later in the same church where they met.

McGreevy, 56, is native of York County, Pa. He received a bachelor’s degree in mechanical engineering from the University of Notre Dame in Indiana. There, he was a running back on the football team that won the 1973 national championship.

Prior to purchasing C&W, McGreevy was a specialist in energy studies for PWI Engineering in Philadelphia.

Pinky, 51, is a native of Queens, N.Y. She received a business certificate from Katharine Gibbs Secretarial School in Huntingdon, Long Island. Pinky is also a caregiver for the elderly.

The couple moved to St. Maximilian Kolbe Parish in 1988.

“I love serving people,” McGreevy said. “I love lifting people up.” And through each C&W client who calls or stops in at the office at 2092 Pottstown Pike, “I get an opportunity to increase that circle of people to help and serve.”

For more information, call (610) 469-1030 or e-mail bob@cwmech.com.

CS&T Staff Writer Christie L. Chicoine may be reached at (215) 587-2468 or cchicoin@adphila.org.

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All the best,

Brian
Co-Founder/President

P.S. I hope you don’t mind me sending you these types of emails. If you do, please click here to unsubscribe.

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                  Traditional filters (throw away, cleanable, pleated or even HEPA) are designed to remove particulate, dust and dirt from the air of HVAC systems. As a result, ventilation (the introduction of untreated outside air) must be used to dilute CO2, ammonia and methane gases that are given off by occupants in the space. If ventilation is inadequate, the buildup of gases and volatile organic compounds (VOCs) given off by building materials such as carpets, walls and epoxies will cause drowsiness and eventually “Sick Building Syndrome”.

Our EUTYCHUS IAQ

DESIGN™ uses Dynamic Air Cleaners® to reduce first cost, energy costs and to improve IAQ. DACs remove not only particulate, as traditional filters do, but they also filter gases – those same bad actor gases discussed above.

Because DACs filter gases, the amount of outside air intake, as required by ASHRAE 62, is reduced from as much as 20 CFM/Person to as little as 4 CFM/Person. This in turn can reduce the tonnage required by as much as 25%!

In addition, the reduced amount of outside air intake will also save 25% of the energy consumed by your HVAC system!  

The third and perhaps best benefit is that our design includes a temperature, humidity and CO2 sensor that monitors the indoor air quality (IAQ) of the air that you work in and breath.

Call us to receive a free inspection and report by a licensed, professional engineer .

 This week our technician, Chris Sauerzopf, installed a custom  Eutychus system in the body of our front office desk.  Here are the pictures:

Fan Placement

Outer Cover & Dynamic Air Cleaner in Place

Custom Eutychus IAQ Design for C&W Mechanical, Inc. Office

C&W Mechanical, Inc. is a team of Mechanical Contractors located in Pottstown, PA.  We specialize in design-build and environmental engineering solutions for large industrial manufacturers.  Our team of highly trained technicians, overseen by Licensed Professional Engineers, has provided services to Eastern Pennsylvania for over 22 years.

This blog is dedicated to providing our past, present and prospective clients/employees with news, updates and general information that concern the industrial manufacturing community.