Worst possible scenario in a power failure

[bean]

My store experienced quite possibly the worst possible scenario last night.

First off, for some bizarre reason, when the store was built a generator wasn't included. The only backup power in the store is for the phone system (about 8 hours worth), registers (15 minutes), and a few lights (an hour or so).

Last night we had an ice storm roll through - this is second hand from the closer, since I left before the storm hit. She said the lights started flickering, then the power would go off, come right back on, stay on just long enough for the florescent lights to come back on, go out, repeat for about 10 minutes, they heard a loud bang at some point during the surges, then it finally stayed off. It stayed off for a couple of hours, so they went ahead and locked up and everyone went home. Remember the fact that the power was going off and on basically like a 5 year old flipping a light switch rapidly, this is important.

Today when I got to work at 6am, the store stunk bad - it smelled like rotten food. The power was on, but I noticed a lot of the refrigerated cases weren't lit up. Then I noticed all of the refrigerated cases being cleaned out. Uh oh.

We have a couple of main power feeds - all 480 volt 3 phase. The bang? One of the main breakers on 1 phase self destructing. The main chillers were knocked out entirely, along with about 1/4 of everything else in the store - and nobody knew until about 5am today. Those chillers served the meat department, seafood, produce, "specialty" (expensive cheeses), beer/wine, our entire frozen food section, and the lighting for most of the display cases. The only chiller that was still online served dairy and deli. The phones were working normally around 7:00 AM, though the display looked dim on the one by my counter - by 7:30 am (next time I looked at it) we had no phones whatsoever.. guess the backup ran out for it.

So not only did we lose tens of thousands of dollars in stock (meat alone lost $8k - they were able to salvage everything near the floor in their backstock freezer, so they lost about half their inventory), we had no phones. I'd say most of our employees didn't show up - a lot were trying to call to see if we'd be open, but we only had our personal cellphones at that point. Electricians finally got the breaker replaced at around 11:30 am, and our phone system came back online at almost 12:00. We finally unlocked the doors at noon (we normally open at 8). Thankfully, since the frozen section had sealed cases, nothing was lost there (we kept an eye on the temps, they never got above 30F).

And of course I got yelled at by plenty of people when I would go to the door and point at the "Store closed due to power failure" sign taped to it - they'd point at the lights and say "why are those on?" and I'd have to explain lights were the ONLY thing working - no registers, no coolers, no phones, and I sure wasn't going to sell them spoiled meat or risk them opening the frozen cases.

Though it was amusing as hell watching some people walk face first into the electric doors, not paying attention to the sign or the fact that, you know, the door didn't open. One lady even started trying to pry the (locked) door open, then started hitting it.

On the plus side, I did get to work my full shift, though most of it was spent in the kitchen. Some of the meats that had gotten close to room temp, but not yet spoiled, were donated to my department, so we had to hustle to get it all cooked and put to use before it went bad. I only spent about 2 hours serving customers - around 6:30am the assistant store manager asked me to cook up a bunch of breakfast pizzas to feed the entire store (6 of them were done by a coworker, and I did the last 2), didn't make another pizza until noon.

... still don't understand why a huge grocery store (we're larger than most of the "major" stores around here) doesn't have any form of backup power for refrigeration though.

[SteverinoNY]

That's awful that your grocery store does not have backup power for all the main freezers and coolers. When we lose power at my grocery store (also a large one like yours) everyone goes into freakout mode. Our generators (we have several, living in upstate NY they are a necessity) power 1/2 of our registers and the self checkout machine. Another powers the lights at 1/2 power (dim, but still enough to see and better than nothing). The largest of all the generators powers all the frozen cases in case of a power outage. At that point of power loss, any staff not doing anything vital (ringing customers, counting tills, etc) goes to the back room and grabs any piece of cardboard they can find and as much duct tape as they can find and begins sealing up the open cases and taping the doors shut on the closed cases. The perishable depts (deli, meat, seafood) pack their cases with as much ice as they can hold and seal them with cardboard. Also, the open coolers are filled with ice. Anything in backstock (as our large storage freezers arent on a generator is placed in a truck with a refrigeration unit and is also loaded with ice...we have a commercial ice maker on site powered by its own dedicated generator bought from the hardware store).

We've done this before as you can tell. The heat or phones arent generator powered, but if you grab a jacket, you are fine. Besides most everyone has a cell phone who works there nowadays.

Sorry to your store because you lost so much merchandise.

[FTGTF]

Worst to lose in power failures is the ice cream cases and ice boxes. They just poor out all over the floor

[bean]

From what I understand we lose power fairly often too, though usually not for more than an hour or so. This makes the 2nd power failure since I've worked there - I've been there a little under a month, though the first one only lasted a few minutes and was the result of lightning striking basically across the street. For comparison, my extremely ghetto apartment in a very run down area built in the 60s has lost power once in the year I've lived here (though that lasted about 3 hours).

Open cases get covered with duct tape and tarps - not great, but it helps some. The registers are on your run of the mill computer battery backups (UPS - uninterruptible power supply), as is the main server, so all of that stays up about 15-20 minutes. When power goes out, we herd everyone toward the registers. Our large backstock coolers are run from the same chillers as the front cases - we have a few massive compressors in the back of the store that handle all of the cases (all but 1 was offline today when I got there). Oh yeah - we had half of our heat. As in most of the store was comfortable - I could actually see my breath in the back room (oddly enough, the thermometers on the coolers back there were in the 60s, I guess the heat from the fans and lights). Pretty sure we have insurance for this type of thing though - it sucks losing so much food, but it won't affect the store that much. We run well over $1M in sales a week.

FTGTF, ice cream is one of the few things we didn't lose - our frozen cases are mostly enclosed (door type) and didn't even break 34F. The packages of ice cream closest to the doors had to be tossed, the rest was fine.

To give an idea of size - we're over 60,000 sq ft, but below 70,000 sq ft. Pretty decent sized store, especially for the suburbs. (I know the exact size, I'd just rather not help any internet detectives narrow down the exact location I'm at)

[Irving Patrick Freleigh]

We have no generator at my store either, although I'm told years ago we had a rather large, noisy diesel generator.

We don't have nearly the amount of coolers and freezers bean's store has, but if the power were to go out by us for a significant period of time, we'd have a pretty good mess on our hands as well.

[bean]

I'll gladly take a noisy diesel generator over losing all of this again. Hell, our compressors are easily as loud as most generators anyway.

Funny thing is, if I worked at most stores I probably wouldn't give a crap, but we have a gain sharing program in place. I'm glad my department didn't lose anything besides a little bit of pizza dough (we were the only ones not to lose anything significant aside from bakery), but I really feel for the folks in the other departments.

But when you think about it.. even with generators, nobody could predict a massive main breaker blowing out. Even if a generator had kicked in, that breaker would have interrupted power, it would have failed regardless of backup power. Generators normally take 30-60 seconds to start up and switch over, and from what I was told, the surges were every 5-15 seconds until they finally lost power completely. Just one of those "one in a million" things I guess

[SuperDan]

We have one diesel generator, and it doesn't cover refrigeration at all. Just sales floor lighting and registers. It also does a half-ass job of lighting the backroom (we can see the flourescent tubes pulsing in the back room, the lights on the sales floor that are on are on at normal levels, but about 1/3 of the sales floor lighting is off). It also doesn't back up the computers in the LP office, so power outages can be a thief's paradise if they know what they're doing. Certain managers actually station uniformed employees around critical areas (meat, cigarettes, beer, baby, medicine, front door) during power outages.

Refrigeration compressors take an assload of power. I'd suspect we'd need three or four of the generator we have if we were just going to power the display coolers--I would hate to think what would be needed to power the backstock coolers.

Rarely does our power go out for any length of time. If it is out for more than an hour, we stop allowing people to shop the aisles with door coolers and we cover the open upright coolers and coffin coolers with paper. After three or four hours we'll start pulling from the coolers--getting anything that's spoiled ready to be counted and pitched, and condensing anything that's good in the backstock coolers in hopes that many cold items together will stay cold longer. This hasn't been necesary in the time that I've been there though.

[bean]

I figure that it would cost, at the very least, $100-$150k to outfit just our refrigeration alone with generators - that's just the cost of the generators, not including the cost of rewiring the distribution panels. Maybe closer to $250k.

Unfortunately, the electric grid that my store is on is barely enough to service the area in the spring... when summer hits I'm told the power goes out weekly for an hour or two at a time, by both store managers and friends who live in the same area.

From what I can read of the diagrams of our piping and wiring, the backstock compressors also handle the majority of the front coolers as well - if we can get the compressors powered, then we just need to get a 120V source for the circulation fans in the coolers. The few front coolers that aren't on the compressors have their own compressors and run off of 120V or 240V, and are far from critical units - we're talking drink coolers or catering coolers.

We do have a remodel coming up in a couple of months - I'm really hoping they'll at least consider bringing in a generator or two, since they're pretty much ripping up the entire store anyway.

Of course, I'm not an electrician, plumber, or refrigeration tech. As soon as the power goes out we lock the doors and start herding people to the registers. Can't get checked out before they go down? Too bad, so sad, we'll restock it but you'll have to leave.

Our backup lighting and registers are all battery powered - your standard store bought UPS units for the registers, and the occasional emergency lighting ballast with a built in battery in an occasional light.