Stench from rotten refrigerator sickens 28; San Jose office evacuated

I'd been meaning to post this for awhile, but never got around to it. Now seems to be a good time! Link!

Rotten meat, snarky reporter and the deadly use of Lysol, news at 11!

Quote :

It had been somebody's lunch once. Or maybe a soft-cheese snack, tucked away —and then forgotten — in the back of an office mini-fridge at the
AT&T call center in North San Jose

That was long ago, before figs become fur-bearing and corned beef mutates into stink on rye. Nobody really knows what it was in the offending refrigerator that prompted an evacuation Tuesday morning and ambulance rides to the hospital for seven people, who were overcome by the stench and fumes from an ill-fated attempt to clean it.

It finally became so unbearable that the San Jose Fire Department's hazmat team was summoned to the North First Street office complex just before lunchtime. Before they could determine that it wasn't an attempt by terrorists to disable the information grid — maybe just some broccoli from the Bush administration gone really, really bad — a second alarm was issued. In the end, 325 AT&T employees poured out to a parking lot that was
the company's designated evacuation site. A total of 50 firefighters
and 18 emergency vehicles raced to the scene. Seven employees, who were
vomiting or complaining of nausea, were treated at area hospitals.

Why didn't the brave soul that tried to clean the fridge not notice the smell?

Quote :

The aroma of rotting food was hard enough to stomach. But when an employee decided to remove the mess to a conference room and scour the fridge with a cleaning fluid similar to 409 or Lysol, "she didn't smell a thing," said Capt. Barry Stallard of the fire department.

The woman on fridge duty had previously undergone nasal surgery for allergies.

:lol!:

Did no one use the fridge for several months? How could they not notice the smell starting before it was necessary to call hazmat? I can't help but think the people who were assigned to clean the noxious fridge were pansies and thought the hazmat people would clean it for them. That's hilarious.

Sane offices have a cleaning rota...a bit too obvious, possibly.

Solitia wrote:

Did no one use the fridge for several months? How could they not notice the smell starting before it was necessary to call hazmat? I can't help but think the people who were assigned to clean the noxious fridge were pansies and thought the hazmat people would clean it for them. That's hilarious.

I think it would be kind of awesome if hazmat confiscated the stinky fridge because it's now hazardous material. I mean, if it reeked so bad that it made people sick, they just might do it.

Several years ago there were some forest fires near where I live and some people had to evacuate in a hurry. They had irreplaceable family momentoes and necesseties for being away from their homes packed up in their cars already, as soon as they were warned they might have to evacuate. When the firefighters told them to leave, they had about five minutes.

So, there was just nothing they could do about their freezers full of meat. Most of the houses were saved from the fire, but the power had been out in the area for two weeks. When the evacuees got back, their freezers were full of putrid food and had to be desposed of by hazmat teams. Luckily people were really generous and I think new freezers and fridges were provided to people who couldn't afford to replace them.

None of those freezers made anyone sick but it had been determined that they were no longer fit to use for food. I can only imagine how nasty this fridge must have been!

I suppose the only two people who used the fridge was the woman with no sense of smell and one person who forgot his lunch in there sometime around when the Beatles broke up.

I am printing out this story and taping it up on the fridge at work. That thing only gets cleaned out when someone's in the mood, which is maybe once every two months or so. We used to have a strict "No food left overnight" policy, but it's kind of fallen by the wayside lately.

I'd seen some nasty shit in the fridges at various places I've worked, but nothing on the scale of that! D: I think the worst I ever saw/smelled was someone had left a bunch of shrimp and pasta for a long time.

Nurvingiel wrote:

I think it would be kind of awesome if hazmat confiscated the stinky fridge because it's now hazardous material. I mean, if it reeked so bad that it made people sick, they just might do it.

Several years ago there were some forest fires near where I live and some people had to evacuate in a hurry. They had irreplaceable family momentoes and necesseties for being away from their homes packed up in their cars already, as soon as they were warned they might have to evacuate. When the firefighters told them to leave, they had about five minutes.

So, there was just nothing they could do about their freezers full of meat. Most of the houses were saved from the fire, but the power had been out in the area for two weeks. When the evacuees got back, their freezers were full of putrid food and had to be desposed of by hazmat teams. Luckily people were really generous and I think new freezers and fridges were provided to people who couldn't afford to replace them.

None of those freezers made anyone sick but it had been determined that they were no longer fit to use for food. I can only imagine how nasty this fridge must have been!

I suppose the only two people who used the fridge was the woman with no sense of smell and one person who forgot his lunch in there sometime around when the Beatles broke up.

That would be acceptable, honestly, because they were evacuated and had no choice. The people leaving their food were just lazy. Then again, when I look at the fridge at work, it doesn't surprise me if no one cleaned it out. Can you imagine being evacuated for your fridge?

How terrible for those people who had to come home to their appliance unusable and all their food wasted after spending money to go somewhere else. That would be awful.

How in the world did it get that bad that it became a health hazard? You know what, don't answer that. I probably already know the answer.

Nurvingiel wrote:

Stinky fridge story.

This reminds me of something that happened to me, only not as funny. We went away for like three weeks on vacation for my mom and stepdad's wedding, and our deep freezer that we use for all of our meat was unplugged accidentally (it was my fault; we have an outlet extender and when I'd unplugged the computer, the whole outlet unplugged and I didn't notice). All the ice had melted, so we had this sort of putrid soup of rotten venison, paper, and water in the bottom of the freezer. My stepdad, probably not thinking clearly since he was up at five in the morning, saw that it was unplugged, and by sheer instinct, plugged it back in. My mom and I didn't discover the mess until we woke up like five or six hours later and went to take something out for dinner. The whole thing was frozen solid by then.



We had to re-thaw all the rotten meat with hot water to get it out of the bottom of the freezer. No hazmat, no professional cleaners, just me and my mom with several buckets of hot water, bleach, and some dollar-store rubber gloves. And a lot of gagging. Truly a story for the grandkids.

We still use the freezer, by the way. We managed to get all the smell out after a few days and it's perfectly fine. We haven't had any more accidents, either.

Something similar happened in my office a few years ago. Someone left, and wasn't replaced, but the desk remained as a spare working area, which was very seldom used. After a while, we started to notice a strange smell wafting around the room, but as the office was right next to the social club's premises, we didn't find that too out of the ordinary.

Time went by... the smell got worse... We pretty much took the office to pieces trying to find the source of the pong. Finally, we jemmied open the locked drawer of the spare desk. Suffice it to say if we'd left it much longer, the six-month-old egg-and-mayonnaise sandwich which had been left in there would have developed sentient life (and might have replaced some of our senior management).

I think I heard this story at work the other day, after I told a story of my own about a fridge that was left uncleaned with random cheese debris inside it for months and months. I opened it once and was assaulted by a squamous odour from the nethermost depths of R'Lyeh. I considered sticking a biohazard symbol on the door, although it's proably just as well I didn't, since this was in a university materials science department where ACTUAL biohazardous material could sometimes be found.