George Young Group

November/December 2007

A Bellwether History of Odd Jobs and Long Hauls

Philadelphia subcontractor has established a niche by tackling unusual lifting projects and pursuing new market specialties

By Tom Nicholson

NASA’s Beta Model Lunar Lander moves to the Benjamin Franklin Institute in Philadelphia.

The story of the george Young Group, a Philadelphia-based transport, rigging and millwrighting firm, begins at a poker table somewhere in the City of Brotherly Love in 1869.

Charles Young, the current company president’s great-granduncle, bet the first incarnation of the company on a losing hand during a poker match against his brother George. Charles lost the bet and George acquired the company, marking the beginning of the George Young Co., a moniker the firm has retained through four generations of sons for nearly 150 years.

Today, the company is one of the oldest family-owned firms in the nation. Headed by George Young, the firm has grown to include three separate companies: George Young Co., the transport and rigging company; George Young Mechanical LLC, a unit formed in 2005 to handle code welding on pressure vessels and boilers; and George Young Installations Puerto Rico, another unit established in 2005 that installs process equipment for pharmaceutical manufacturers in the Caribbean island’s robust pharmaceutical industry. It is a company with a wide-reaching mission and a portfolio that few other companies can match.

The firm’s claim to fame in the Philadelphia region stems partly from being called upon by the city to move the Liberty Bell four times, a project that pretty much epitomizes the term “precious cargo.” Young says moving the 2,040-lb bell required an inordinate amount of planning, a requirement for all the hoisting and hauling jobs the company performs.

“In this business, when you think everything is planned for, plan again,” Young says. A project “can take two years to plan, but the move may take only four hours to perform.”

No guidebooks cover lifting and moving big, expensive objects without a hitch. Every project is different, Young says. “Our engineers could be called imagineers, to borrow a term from Disney, because they have to invent ways to accomplish projects differently each time,” he adds. “There is no template.”

On the Liberty Bell’s most recent move, a 1,000-ft haul down Independence Hall to its new home at the Liberty Bell Center, engineers designed and built an eight-wheeled platform, dubbed the “Bell-mobile,” to precisely fit the national icon after being hoisted by a 22-ft hydraulic gantry.

Engineers had to measure the famous crack in the bell using gauges to determine movements within 1/100th of a human hair. “We could not allow the crack to widen at all,” Young says.

The crew of union riggers making the move rehearsed three times beforehand. Using a specially designed forklift outfitted with a nitrogen load-dampening system, the move was carried out smoothly, the only acceptable way to handle fragile cargo in this line of work where there’s often only one-shot at success.

“‘Drop’ is a four-letter word in this business,” Young says. “There are many things in this world that have to be moved. It is high risk but also high reward.”

Custom Hauls

The firm’s remarkable portfolio of moves, hoists and hauls began in the early 1900s when the company performed the first transcontinental haul, a load of soap, amid warnings that “it couldn’t be done.” Young offers that move as an example of the “spirit of overcoming every obstacle that still remains in this company.”

Crews prepare to lift a 180-ton main-drive motor to be positioned in a steel mill.

Another outside-the-box project was a hoist the company was contracted to perform at the Chrysler Building in New York City. Young’s engineers had to lift two massive transformers to the building’s 65th floor, a distance of 670 ft.

Once again, no template or preexisting infrastructure existed to facilitate the lift, Young says. The engineers invented a horizontal beam-and-winching system built out from the building’s 66th floor and completed the hoist without a snag. “This was another completely custom-designed job,” Young says.

The firm is the go-to contractor for many of Philadelphia’s industrial and power companies when emergency lifts and moves have to be accomplished fast. “Paper mills and power-generation companies have called on us when they need large, heavy pieces of equipment replaced as fast as possible,” Young says. “When they do, we work around the clock.”

But engineering the lift and haul is only a part of the job. Imagination also is put to the test. “A modern building will have good access in most cases,” Young says. “But older buildings that have been extended and added onto over the years can be a challenge, and sometimes we have to become really inventive.

“We’ve tunneled into buildings, cut holes in floors and sometimes have had to use helicopters [to gain access and perform a hoist or move]. Sometimes the obstacles can be almost overwhelming,” he says.

A 500-ton gantry lifts nuclear feedwater heaters, a typically heavy, yet delicate job the firm regularly performs.

Young acknowledges the inherent danger in hoisting objects that weigh many tons but attributes the firm’s culture of placing importance on planning as the key to a largely accident-free safety history.

Ted Lekawa, the firm’s safety director, says the union craftsmen the firm employs on jobs are “highly trained in safety. It can be dangerous work, but we focus on planning carefully and recognize that safety goes above and beyond lifting.”

The company’s mechanical division, providing code welding on pressure vessels and boiler equipment, is headed by Young’s sister, Meredith Dornenburg. As president of George Young Mechanical LLC since its inception in 2005, Dornenburg also juggles duties as the firm’s secretary-treasurer, a role she has filled for the past 24 years.

Dornenburg has steered the newly created mechanical company into a $15-million-a-year business. “We wanted to expand our business into other fields, but weren’t sure where until we were approached with the idea to start the mechanical business,” she says. “There have been some growing pains, but it has been successful.”

The firm is the go-to company for power companies in the Philadelphia area when replacements of several-hundred-ton transformers are needed.

Last year the mechanical company represented about 50% of the group’s revenue. “This year it is more like 30%, but we still expect it to grow,” Dornenburg says.

Eyeing new growth opportunities in the pharmaceutical industry, Young created another new branch of the group with the clean and hygienic equipment installations company in Puerto Rico in 2005. The firm installs prefabricated modules of hygienic equipment designed to perform specified process operations within plants.

Phil String, director of pharmaceutical and biopharmaceutical services, says the unit has completed six major projects since 2005, totaling about $10 million.

“What we excel at in Puerto Rico is hand rigging, or what I call finesse rigging, where you have to raise a module up and insert it within a structure,” String says. “The modules are 30,000 lb to 60,000 lb each, but they require finesse to insert between columns and under pipe racks. There’s a tremendous amount of sequencing and layout work.”

String has been employed at George Young for about two and a half years but was familiar with it as a client for many years before joining the firm.

“I worked for companies that used George Young’s services, and what makes this company successful is you are always guaranteed to get the same quality service every time,” he says.

More growth is on the horizon for the fourth-generation company, as expansion in each of its three companies is poised to continue, says Young. “Things look good for our future.” And that’s not a bad hand to be holding.