All Keys Port-A-Lets serves the region from Key Largo, Florida, to Miami-Dade County, but true to its name, it serves all of the keys, including Pigeon Key, a 5-acre island.
While area keys are connected by the nearby Seven Mile Bridge, which is part of the Florida Overseas Highway, tiny Pigeon Key is accessible only by the Old Seven Mile Bridge, a narrow, historic structure now used for pedestrians, bicyclists and anglers. When the company serves customers on Pigeon Key, it has to use the old bridge to cross the seven miles from Marathon.
“It's private property, and we can't access the island without permission from somebody on the island,” says Gabriel Venzant, owner of All Keys. “Safety is a huge priority, so we have to contract to be there at a specific time and contact the person who requires the work. Someone will drive the length of the bridge in a golf cart and announce that a truck is coming by and that people need to move off to the side ahead of us.”
Pigeon Key was most famously used as a work camp island to extend the Florida East Coast Railway to Key West, a project completed in 1912. Today, the island features eight buildings on the National Register of Historic Places, including some of the original work camp structures. The island has become a popular destination for school field trips to historical sites and attractions, including Pigeon Key Marine Science Summer Camps.
“One of those camps has a series of cabins served by a septic tank and a small cafeteria on site,” Venzant says. “On our last service trip, we pumped out the septic tank and grease trap for them.”
All Keys also provides portable restroom rentals and service for events on the island. In some cases, the pump trucks wait until the event finishes before returning to the mainland. For longer events, they’ll deliver one day and return two or three days later using the same bridge-closure protocol.
Ideally, jobs can be combined and scheduled on the same day to avoid bridge closures.
“But that would be in a perfect world,” Venzant says. “On our last event service job for Pigeon Key, we had already picked up the portable restrooms when somebody called us asking if we were available to assist a plumber who needed help pumping out a residential lift station. Of course, we said, ‘Absolutely.’ We never say ‘No.’”
Read the complete profile of All Keys Port-A-Lets in the March issue of PRO magazine, now available online.
