Pennsylvania College of Technology welding students have given new life to a 41-year-old rescue boat used by the Montgomery Emergency Management Agency to serve Lycoming County.

About 30 students in four sections of the Welding Blueprint & Layout II class taught by Michael R. Allen, co-department head of welding, spent several weeks repairing the 15-foot-long boat and its trailer. The boat is the all-volunteer agency’s primary response vessel and has been part of 50-plus rescue missions during the past 30 years, according to Greg Gruver, Montgomery EMA coordinator.

“This boat is the most versatile in all weather conditions, and it’s reliability is unmatched,” said Gruver, who graduated from Penn College with a forestry degree in 1997. “The boat has responded to calls throughout central Pennsylvania. We are part of a water rescue taskforce that is dispatched countywide. The boat has been all over Lycoming County, from numerous high stream and river rescues to saving individuals from their flooding homes.”

With mounting wear and tear after decades of service and the nonprofit group facing prohibitive repair costs, Greg Gruver’s cousin and fellow volunteer, Michael Gruver, a 1994 Penn College graduate (broadcast communications), sought his alma mater’s assistance. Michael Gruver is friends with Craig A. Miller, assistant professor and department head of engineering design technology, and knew that Miller produced blueprints for the steel globe that Penn College welding students fabricated last year for the Little League Baseball World Series complex in South Williamsport.

“I asked Craig if he thought Penn College would be interested in helping out another local nonprofit with some welding work,” Michael Gruver said. “Craig thought it would be a great real-world project for the students and spoke with Mike Allen, and Mike was glad to take this project on.”

The repairs included replacing the boat’s deteriorated wooden floor with aluminum, repairing cracks in the frame of the 18-foot-long trailer, installing aluminum step plates on the side of the trailer and trading mild steel light mounts for aluminum ones.

“This was a good project for the students to work on because it gave them a chance to use multiple pieces of equipment in the fabrication and automation areas of our 55,000-plus-square-foot welding facility,” Allen said. “They used the CNC plasma cutting table to cut out the boat’s new aluminum floor plates. They also had the opportunity to rivet, rather than weld, the pieces together, and some of the students had never done that before. Installing the floor plates was the most challenging part because some were not square pieces.”

The students employed a press brake to bend the metal.

“Getting the right curvature for the aluminum bottom was the most challenging,” said Andrew Anastasi, of Mount Tabor, New Jersey. “There was more to it than a typical assignment.”

“It was a fun activity,” added Joseph P. O’Brien, of Philadelphia. “It was different being able to work on something outside of the college and help out the community.”

Assisting the community was a bonus for Allen.

“I am very proud to help our local first responders, and I know the students who worked on it are glad they had the opportunity to do so,” he said. “The most impressive thing about the students’ work was that I put different groups on the project and they all just fell in and picked up where the previous group left off.”

Greg Gruver estimated the Penn College work saved Montgomery EMA several thousand dollars in repair costs.

The agency bought the boat – powered by a 50-horsepower gas engine – from Grumman, now known as Northrop Grumman, in Marathon, New York, in 1985. It was modified to meet emergency standards at the former Grumman plant in Montgomery.

“Being on the water rescue team for over 30 years, I’ve been on that boat around a thousand hours for training and rescues,” Greg Gruver said. “I could now see us putting another thousand hours’ worth of time on the boat.”

“We are extremely grateful for the Penn College faculty and students,” Michael Gruver said. “They treated the project with real dedication, paying attention to every detail and making sure everything was done the right way. Knowing that our boat was repaired by people who share the same Penn College roots makes us even more appreciative of the time, effort and heart they put into helping us get it back on the water.”