A true story:
I work in the very center of the
city of Palo Alto, in a nice office building. We are surrounded on every side by
restaurants, hotels, and so forth. But we are a computer company, and so our building ends
up needing a lot of electricity. We use about a megawatt (1 million watts).
In order to deliver a million
watts of electricity to an office building, you need a very large transformer. These
transformers are too big to put on poles, and besides in quaint downtown areas nobody
likes those poles any more. So the transformers are put underground. The million-watt
transformer that powers our office building is located in an underground vault in the
middle of a walkway that leads to City Hall. The transformer is about the size of a small
car, and the transformer vault is about the size of a one-car garage, except that the way
you get in is to climb down a ladder from the street level. The top of the transformer
vault is well ventilated, because a million-watt transformer generates a lot of heat.
Several fine restaurants are near
this walkway, along with a bank, an art supply store, and so forth. There's a lot of foot
traffic. This being California, where it never rains, and this being Palo Alto, where it
is always springtime, the restaurants have outdoor seating areas that are very popular.
Recently the patrons of one
restaurant started to complain that there was an unpleasant odor in their otherwise
idyllic outdoor seating area. Soon the Health Department was called, and they quickly
determined that the odor was caused by rancid oil that had seeped into the sidewalk.
Further investigation showed that the source of the rancid oil was overflow from a nearby
grating. The grating was marked "City of Palo Alto Utilities,'' so the utility
department was called.
The utility crew quickly
discovered the problem. The oil wasn't really oil, it was molten deep-frying grease, which
was molten because it was being kept warm by a million-watt transformer. The entire vault
was completely full of used frying grease, about 2000 gallons of it, which was enough to
completely cover the transformer. The heat of the transformer kept the grease from
solidifying.
Police quickly figured out what
had happened. Every night for quite a number of years, one of the nearby restaurants had,
at closing time, emptied its fryer into the transformer vault, thinking that they were
dumping it into the storm sewer. It's quite illegal to dump grease into a storm sewer, of
course, but they probably figured they would never get caught.
Transformers do occasionally
overheat; this is why they are kept in concrete vaults. If this one had overheated, we
would have had the mother of all grease fires.
Last night they shut off all of
the electrical power, pumped out the hot grease, washed out the vault, and replaced the
transformer. It's very fortunate that nobody was killed.
Today's "daily special'' menu
did not include the usual fried fish.
Source Site
DIET QUESTIONS ANSWERED 
heart 
fact, they're permeated in it. How could getting more vegetables be bad
for you? 
