TRENCHTECH KEEPS CONTRACTORS SAFE IN THE TRENCHES

TrenchTech’s partial listing includes aluminum and steel trench boxes, slide rail systems for major excavations, aluminum hydraulic shoring, build-a-box shielding systems, road plates, manhole shields and fall protection barriers. While TrenchTech does not fabricate shields from scratch for customers — three full-time company welders repair inventory as needed — Efficiency Production engineers and welders in Michigan can design and build products for contractors with special shoring needs.

Trench shoring products don’t make the heart flutter, unless you find safety alluring. People in the trenches do. Workers below ground level have a special place in their hearts for shielding that protects them from collapsing earthen walls that can bury them in a few terrible seconds.

“Safety is the number one priority,” said Jay Kerrigan, founder and owner of TrenchTech Inc., which supplies shoring and shielding equipment across a large market in the Northeast and the mid-Atlantic states. “Our goal is to offer customers solutions, sometimes two or three solutions on a job, options they can choose from to pick the most efficient system for a particular project — always keeping safety in mind.”

The focus on safety is appropriate. Gravity doesn’t take a day off, so danger looms whenever someone in a hardhat descends a ladder into a lower-level construction project. On average, 18 to 20 trench workers in the United States are killed each year in cave-ins, according to Bureau of Labor Statistics data.

Trenching contractors used to combat this danger with timber barriers erected on site. However, that began to change 30 years ago about the time TrenchTech was founded. Renting of prefabricated steel and aluminum shoring equipment transformed the situation. Contractors were introduced to ready-made in-the-trench shields, hydraulic shoring and expandable slide-rail systems.

Today, TrenchTech has a $40 million inventory of these and other shoring products in its three Northeast and mid-Atlantic locations — all available for quick dispatch along the Interstate 95 highway corridor running the length of the Atlantic coast. For rent or purchase, the equipment has a common underlying purpose: preserving life.

Jay Kerrigan didn’t exactly grow up in trenches, but he spent some time in them as a young construction worker. He later worked for a distributor whose product lines included then-relatively novel pre-manufactured shoring, which Kerrigan saw as a product with growth potential. In 1990, he was given a chance to open an office for a manufacturer of hydraulic aluminum shoring products and launched TrenchTech in Toms River, N.J.

The company initially offered other construction tools along with trench shoring products. By 1996, however, the company had become a shielding-and-shoring-only firm and Kerrigan had moved his office to Philadelphia.

“We were doing a tremendous amount of business in the eastern and northeastern Pennsylvania markets,” he said. “A Philadelphia location made us more central to that market as well as to our New Jersey accounts.”

By that time, Kerrigan also had ended his representation of the manufacturer that had spawned his business and exclusively offered the equipment line of Efficiency Production. The Michigan manufacturer dates to 1971 and was the first manufacturer and distributor of trench shields in the United States and Canada. It is considered the leading shoring products manufacturer in