Seven people
and a cabinet
of rebuild kits.

Origin

The practice began in June 2014 in a Bay View duplex basement. Aurelio Ferraro had spent twelve years on the truck for a multi-trade Milwaukee plumbing house, the last six of them as the de facto backflow tester whenever a commercial account needed an annual report and nobody else on the bench could find the gauge case. In May 2014 Milwaukee Water Works sent its annual cross-connection notice to roughly nine thousand commercial premises in the city. Roughly thirteen percent of those notices were ignored, escalated, or filed late.¹ Ferraro reasoned that a single person doing nothing but cross-connection work, full time, could turn that thirteen percent into a business.

The first six months ran out of the duplex with a single Ford Transit Connect, a Mid-West 845-5 gauge, and a four-drawer cabinet of Watts 909 and 957 rebuild kits. By December 2014 there were 161 active accounts on the ledger. By December 2017 there were 612. Maeve Okafor came on in March 2018, fresh out of the MATC apprenticeship and already ASSE 5110. Leland Stoltzfus joined in late 2019 from a Madison fire-protection contractor; he had done six years of detector assemblies on RPDAs and DCDAs and knew the dance of submitting parallel meter reads to a water utility better than anyone we'd met. The three of us were the founding partnership in January 2021.

The building

The shop has occupied Suite 110 of 425 W. Florida Street since November 2019. The building is a four-story Cream-City brick warehouse built in 1898 for the Trostel tannery, which dressed leather for buggy upholstery and Brewers'-uniform belts when Milwaukee was the largest leather-tanning center in the world.² The Trostel family operated through 1968; the structure was vacant from 1968 to 1986; light-industrial through the 1990s; mixed-use after a 2009 envelope restoration. We share the floor with a small-batch print bindery, a steel-fabrication design studio, and a non-profit youth bike shop. The freight elevator still has the original Otis nameplate. The east-facing windows look at the Sixth Street Bridge, which is the second of the three downtown river crossings — Sixth, Pittsburgh, St. Paul — that name three of Bay View's six bus routes.

We chose the building partly because the loading bay accepts a tester vehicle with a 9-foot box and partly because the wall thickness, eighteen inches of soft-fired yellow Menomonee Valley brick, keeps the shop a steady 64–68 °F year-round without much HVAC effort. A backflow shop has a peculiar climate requirement: rebuild kits are a mix of EPDM, Buna-N, and silicone diaphragms with a fifteen-year shelf life at consistent temperature and humidity, but a five-year shelf life if you let them swing through a Wisconsin garage attic. Cream-City brick on the second story is approximately the cheapest climate-controlled shelving in Milwaukee.

The cabinet

The defining piece of equipment in the shop is a 1957 four-drawer steel parts cabinet salvaged from the back of the Trostel building during the 2009 envelope work. It holds, in 412 partitioned slots, the rebuild kits for the eleven backflow models that account for 84% of Milwaukee's installed base: Watts 909 and 957 RP; Watts 919 DC; Wilkins 350 and 375 RP/DC and detector variants; Apollo 4ALF-500 series; Conbraco 40-200; Febco 825Y, 860, and 805Y; and the Hersey FRP-II still found on older fire services. Each slot is labeled with a Brother P-touch tape in IBM Plex Mono, model number followed by USC FCCCHR listing number — for example, WT-909-1IN · USC-FCCCHR-09-115 — and is restocked the same Friday a kit ships. Inventory is on a single sheet of grid paper taped to the inside of the third drawer, and that sheet has been the source of truth since November 2019.

We keep this stocked at our cost rather than a customer's because of two arithmetic facts. First, a failed annual test is allowed ten business days under Milwaukee Water Works §295-1(C)(7) to either pass a re-test or be replaced. Ten business days is enough to ship a kit overnight, but a kit shipped overnight from Plumbers Supply or Ferguson is, on average, a 38% chance of arriving on the wrong day relative to the next available tester slot. Stocking kills that variance. Second, an RP rebuild on a working but failing assembly is in the eighty-to-ninety-dollar range for parts and twenty minutes of labor; a replacement is in the three-hundred-fifty to twelve-hundred-dollar range for parts plus a permit, a backflow inspection, and a re-test. We rebuild when we can, replace when we must, and the cabinet makes that choice in our favor four times out of five.

Discipline of the practice

Three disciplines define this shop. First: same-day filing. Every test report leaves the truck before the truck leaves the property. The tester's iPad runs a form built in collaboration with the MWW Cross-Connection Control Section in 2022 that emits both the AHJ-required PDF and the customer-required PDF in one tap. We do not batch. We do not file weekly. We do not let a clipboard sit in a cab.

Second: traceable instruments. The four Mid-West 845-5 differential pressure gauges live in numbered Pelican cases (Gauge-01, 02, 03, 04). Each goes to Mid-West Instrument's Sterling Heights facility for annual NIST-traceable recalibration on a staggered schedule (Q1, Q2, Q3, Q4) so we always have three in service. A test report with an out-of-cert gauge is uniformly rejected by every AHJ in Milwaukee County; we have never had one.

Third: refusals named. When a customer asks us to falsify a test, sign off without testing, omit a failed test cock, or backdate a report, we say no in writing, and we say it specifically. The longest version of that no is a paragraph beginning "We can't help with this." We have lost five accounts over those paragraphs since 2014. We have not lost a license.

What we decline

We decline residential service for water heaters, garbage disposals, fixtures, drain cleaning, slab leaks, water-softener installs, and softener-loop cross-connection assessments. We decline grease-trap pumping (refer to MMSD's industrial pretreatment list). We decline well systems outside city water. We decline any work where our role would be to certify someone else's installation without first inspecting it; if you need a test on a device we did not install or inherit through a written premises survey, we will perform that survey first as a separate scope.

We accept commercial premises across Milwaukee County and selected suburbs in Ozaukee and Waukesha Counties. Our service area is bounded by Capitol Drive to the north (we cross it for fire-line work in Whitefish Bay, Brown Deer, Bayside, Fox Point, Mequon), College Avenue to the south, Highway 100 to the west (we cross for fire service in Wauwatosa, West Allis, New Berlin, Brookfield), and Lake Michigan to the east.

Civic context

Walker's Point sits on the south bank of the Milwaukee River across from the Historic Third Ward, between the river and the inlet that becomes the Milwaukee outer harbor. The neighborhood was platted in 1835 by George H. Walker and was Milwaukee's third original settlement; the Walker's Point Historic District was added to the National Register in 1978 and is the only one of the three original settlements that retains its 19th- and early-20th-century building fabric intact. The neighborhood was the founding site for Allis-Chalmers, Allen-Bradley, Pfister & Vogel, and Pabst — meaning every meaningful piece of Milwaukee industrial history started within a half-mile of the office where we file backflow reports. We take that lineage seriously. The Allen-Bradley clock tower, four blocks west, is still the largest four-faced clock in the western hemisphere; it sets our time at quarter past four every weekday afternoon when the tester vans come back to the bay.

We support the Urban Ecology Center, the Escuela Verde charter school's annual chemistry program (we test their assemblies pro bono), and the Hank Aaron State Trail's spring trail cleanup. We bid the 2024 and 2025 cross-connection contracts for Historic Milwaukee, Inc.'s six restored building portfolio and won both.

References