Warm and Toasty

When I'm walking downtown, I always avoid walking over those big grates in the sidewalk. People have made fun of me for this, but I have recently been vindicated.

Those big grates are frequently covering what we call vaults. These are underground rooms that house electrical equipment. Ever notice how you don't see great big transformers laying around most cities? That's because they are underneath you. Working in the underground network is challenging and of course dangerous. The vaults can fill up with poisonous gas and the air has to be constantly monitored, the vaults themselves are confined spaces and you have to have special training before you can go into them, they fill up with all sorts of gross things (storm water, trash, drug paraphernalia, and in one area we have a vault that fills up with infectious waste from the hospital!), room to maneuver is very limited, it's really stinking hot in there, some of them are very deep, and if something goes wrong you're going to be toast because you can't get away.

We had something go wrong with one of our vaults. Really wrong. The kinda wrong that involves a ball of fire shooting up out of the vault, launching the grate and taking out a huge chunk of downtown Columbus including the arena district, convention center, all the nationwide buildings and hotels. We were lucky that nobody was walking by at that moment.

Apparently one transformer caught on fire and exploded taking 3 others with it. It was so hot that the fire department wouldn't authorize anyone entering the vault for over 24 hours until the temperature dropped.

We had to call the spill into the national spill reporting center (NRC) since we lost more than 25 gallons of oil. This is not an unusual thing for us to have to do, however we did learn something new. Do not use the words explode, exploded, or explosion when reporting spills. The NRC is apparently required to notify the FBI when you use one of those words and then they call us to chat. Nobody wants that.

So, stay away from those grates people!