Manufacturers Step Up In Crisis

A local manufacturer continues driving to his ​“essential” job amid the Covid-19 lockdown — and is working with his colleagues statewide to help hospital docs and nurses have enough face masks to stay safe.

The manufacturer, Pedro Soto, who lives in New Haven’s Westville neighborhood, grew up in the aerospace parts business at his dad’s company, New Haven’s Space-Craft Manufacturing. He has since sold that business. Last October he purchased an aerospace and medical precision-parts machining, lapping, and grinding company called Hygrade Precision Technologies.

Gov. Ned Lamont specifically identified such manufacturers as ​“essential” employers exempt from his shutdown order aimed at slowing Covid-19’s spread.

So Soto and all but three of the company’s 29 workers have been showing up to the Plainville plant each day to turn out and distribute perfectly flat and/or smooth plastic and metal machine components for aerospace companies and medical companies. (Three employees are working remotely because they’re at higher risk for developing serious conditions from the coronavirus.) Workers were already for the most part stationed at least six feet apart in the 35,000-square-foot facility, Soto said. The company has stepped up handwashing and surface-wiping while prohibiting visitors from entering the plant.

Soto also serves as president of the Aerospace Component Manufacturers, a Connecticut and southwestern Massachusetts association. On Tuesday Yale New Haven Hospital contacted the association for help in obtaining plastic face shields that can free up the limited supply of N95 masks for coronavirus-related care, Soto said. He said ​“dozens” of the association’s 115 members are now looking to see if they can help by tapping their supply chains and pivoting their assembly lines to manufacturing the face shields.

“We’re looking to see where we can help,” Soto said during an appearance Wednesday on WNHH FM’s ​“Dateline New Haven” program.

“If we can secure the materials — and we’re pretty good at that,” he’s confident Connecticut companies can produce the face shields.

“The whole situation is showing how complicated and important these [international] supply chains are,” Soto observed. Companies rely on those chains to be able to manufacture at a large scale. And those chains can ​“collapse catastrophically.”

Meanwhile, his own company received a rush order from Michigan-based thyssenkrupp Engineered Plastics for thousands of pieces of precision parts amid the crisis. Hygrade is on the case, he said.

“I count myself lucky” because of his ability to stay in business during the pandemic, Soto said. ​“I would hate to be a restaurant that closed with a day’s notice.”

So far no one has gotten sick at Hygrade, he said. The company hasn’t taken a financial hit. But Soto does expect the Covid-19 crisis to last a while, and expects to see business slow eventually. So he has started the process of looking into federal small-business loans, just in case.

Soto, who chairs the New Haven Development Commission, encouraged all employers immediately to start applying for the loans, even if they haven’t yet suffered major losses. The application takes a while and does not involve fees, he noted. And an applicant can always turn down the loan if it’s not needed.

But, he observed, ​“a hit’s coming,” even for those not already suffering financially.

Click on the video to watch the full interview with Pedro Soto on WNHH FM’s ​“Dateline New Haven.”