Weird Co-inky-dink

Bridgeport was very nearly without another grocery store tonight. As I am dragging my virus laden body around the store tonight I noticed something wasn't right. After all my years of trucking and running heavy equipment I have learned to distinguish the sound of properly running equipment vs something not quite right. It was the latter that caught my attention.

I always make an hourly check of things thruout the store. Primarily refrigeration. You would be surprised how much stuff has to be kept at proper temperature and how fast it can go bad if it's not. I had already made my walkdown a few minutes earlier and was just wandering thru the back of the store when it struck me the motor room (where the compressors are) didn't sound quite right. I opened the door and was greeted with a face full of white smoke. Holy snikies!

I did a quick look around and saw that 2 of my 4 midtemp compressors had shut down. But where was the smoke coming from? Scanning around, I found the culprit. An oil line had burst and was spraying hot oil directly onto the electric motors that run the compressors.

Generally speaking, that's a bad thing.

I shut down the entire rack before it (a) ran out of oil and burned up the compressors and / or (b) caught fire and burned the freaking store down. That's the same thing that happened at Diamond just a few weeks ago. Had I been just a few minutes later that's exactly what would have happened to us and Bridgeport would have been without a grocery store.

Hats off to Clyde Lamb Refrigeration. They were there within minutes of my call and had us up and running quickly.

Such is my job. Hours of boredom highlighted with moments of sheer pandemonium.