Mother of All Grease Fires (1994) | Hacker News Reader

Mother of All Grease Fires (1994)

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Oh, that incident.

That was back when Altavista, the first search engine, was in downtown Palo Alto. Brian Reid was behind that. It was intended as a demo for the DEC Alpha CPU. They wanted to show that a large number of little machines could do a big job, which was a radical idea at the time. They were leasing an old telco building, on Bryant St. behind the Walgreens on University Avenue. The telco had moved to a larger building nearby when they went from crossbar to 5ESS, leaving behind the very tall racks typical of electromagnetic central offices.

That's where the modern data center began. Before this, data centers were raised floor operations. This one was racks and racks of identical servers, with cable trays overhead. This was the first one to look like a telephone central office. Because that's what it was before.

The building is still some kind of data center. For a while, it was PAIX, the Palo Alto Internet Exchange, the peer meeting point for west coast ISPs. Equinix has it now; it's their SV8 location, offering colocation services. Small by modern standards, but close to the early HQs of many famous startups, including Facebook.

The grease problem was written up in the local newspaper, back when Palo Alto had one. Palo Alto Utilities (the city owns its power company) got the report, and quickly realized someone was dumping grease into their transformer vault. So they put someone on stakeout, watching all night. The offending restaurant employee was caught. The restaurant was fined and billed for the cleanup.

In 2006, there was another grease dumping incident in a transformer vault a block further north. This one did result in a grease fire.[1] Palo Alto Fire Department has a CO2 truck, and dumped enough CO2 in to put out the fire. Power was out for most of the night.

I used to live within walking distance of there.

[1] https://www.paloaltoonline.com/news/2006/03/12/grease-dumpin...

Oh man PAIX brings back memories. Most people have no idea how few true convergence points the Internet had back then or how crucial PAIX was to virtually the entire Internet at that point.

Fun fact: I learned yesterday that that expression was popularized in English only as recently as 1991 by none other than Sadam Hussein when he referred to the Gulf War as “the mother of all battles”. At least that’s the story. Apparently it was a bit of a meme in the early nineties, so this post may be referencing it more or less directly. Hussein was of course referencing the Quran.

Part of that popularity (for the "mother of all..." expressions) was Cheney's doing. Playing on Saddam Hussein's phrase "Mother of all battles" with "Mother of all retreats" when describing the retreat of the Iraqi army from Kuwait.

Yep. "Mother of all X" memes weren't even remotely uncommon for a handful of years during and after Operation Desert Storm. The Iraqi Minister of Information, Mohammed Saeed al-Sahhaf, also gave rise to "There are no American infidels in Baghdad. Never!" and the like.

Almost none of those memes are remembered outside of those who were alive and watching the nightly news at the time, but there were some pre-internet memes that were as spread as a modern internet one.

> Mohammed Saeed al-Sahhaf, also gave rise to "There are no American infidels in Baghdad. Never!" and the like.

If you don’t recognize that name, “Baghdad Bob” was the popular nickname he was given back in the 00s.

The mother of all news conferences:

https://youtu.be/wKi3NwLFkX4

During p45 they dropped the MOAB on Afghanistan. The name got stuck in my head.

I was making a lot of Jupyter Notebooks at the time. I would create several versions while narrowing down an algorithm or constructing the principle proof of concept code. When I finally arrived at an essential solution, I would make a single cell file that would write to disc. I named the file *-MOAF, Mother of All Files.

Some things don’t change.

https://archive.ph/Oxcsr

Minor nitpick, transformers are sized in volt-amps, not watts. Apparent power is measured in volt-amps and actual power is measured in watts, the ratio between the two is the power factor.

Plus, “one mega volt-amp” sounds way cooler than “a million watts” :)

It may have been a 1MVA transformer with a 480V three-phase secondary, that’s the properly sized transformer, but the utility may have undersized it at 500kVA based on calculated load.

That transformer was already oil-cooled, so adding a couple thousand extra gallons probably didn’t hurt the transformer too much lol.

That was my thought as well. This might have improved heat transfer, especially to the much cooler ground surrounding it.

Having worked in food service, I learned that restaurants are low-margin businesses that will cut every corner they can. Paying to have their grease taken care of when there's a convenient drain out back is a non-starter. It wouldn't be surprising if they also never cleaned their ventilation hoods or the grease trap in the drains. When you see a mention of a restaurant fire (that isn't arson), it's likely because of dirty hoods.

Another stupid part of this: used cooking grease has positive market value! Quite a few companies, even in expensive places like Palo Alto, will happily supply you, for free, with barrels and such to hold your grease, and they'll come empty them when they're full, and I think you can even often negotiate to get paid to give these companies your grease.

It gets recycled into various non-tasty but still useful commodities.

(The economics work out at restaurant scale but not necessarily at household scale. If you deep fry a lot at home, you might be responsible for transporting your own grease to someone who wants it.)

Was this also the case back in 1994?

https://www.thesylvaherald.com/history/article_c59f8f3e-dfb6...

In the old days people would convert diesel trucks and cars to run on "biodiesel" which was lightly processed used cooking oil. You could tell who did that because their cars always smelled like french fries.

In the UK, all the used oil from MacDonalds is converted into biodiesel. I often walk past the plan where they do this and there's usually a lorry waiting to be allowed in through the gates.

A few years back there was some eco-warrior protest outside trying to stop the lorries going in. Not really sure what they were trying to achieve with that as it seemed counter to their aims.

Occasionally people in the UK get caught putting cooking oil in their (diesel ) cars, which is not illegal per se - but technically if you do it, you should pay fuel tax, which they generally don't. McDonald's are large enough that they will be, knowing that they would inevitably be caught.

Many eco-warrior types, not every single one but many, have... how to put this gently... not thought things all the way through. To name just one example I can think of: protesting an oil pipeline being constructed and/or extended. Well, what will happen if the pipeline doesn't go in? People will still want gasoline — protesting the pipeline isn't going to do anything about people's desire to drive their cars around — so that oil is going to get transported to the refinery somehow. If not in a pipeline, then it'll get transported by train or truck. Which will 1) burn a lot more fuel than transporting the same amount of oil through a pipeline, and 2) be more prone to accidents and oil spills (a tiny chance per truck, but that adds up fast when there are thousands of trucks per month), therefore very likely to spill more oil than the pipeline would have. In other words, blocking that pipeline is very likely to cause more ecological damage than having it built would have caused.

The eco-warrior types protesting the pipeline probably think that they're reducing the use of oil. But they haven't thought it all the way through.

Are you sure this isn't a strawman? The recent Dakota pipeline protests for example were very clearly about water safety and building through native burial grounds and other historic native sites. Pretty much every pipeline protest I can think of is more concerned with environmental danger of spills, not reducing oil. And a catastrophic pipeline spill can be much worse than isolated truck spills, though I'd love to know more about research on that front.

So standard NIMBY? "I think oil pipelines are great, just not in my backyard!"

There is a clear difference between "I don't want to look at the pipeline" and "pipelines have an established track record of cutting corners and avoiding regulation wherever possible which leads to leaks and spills, leaks and spills cause irreparable damage to the environment including the environment in the middle of our community, and the company is attempting to exploit our already historically exploited community"

While we're at it, let's think the rest of the way through, and consider the marginal effect that additional transportation cost has on price and therefore both the supply and demand side, shall we?

To prove or disprove your hypothesis, we can look at historical gas prices.

In today's dollars (adjusted for inflation) the US average gas price stayed below $2.75/gal from roughly 1986-2002. Then they broke through that barrier, only ever going below it again for two brief moments in 2016 and in 2020. Most of the time since, they've been well above $3.50, and above $4 sometimes. [1]

If you're right that demand for gasoline is highly elastic, meaning people adjust their demand in response to price, then since gas prices got much more expensive, we should expect that gas usage decreased. Have we seen this? (No. [2]) Of course we haven't, because somewhere between 63-67% of people in the US and Canada live in car-dependent suburbs.[3] These cities and towns, in addition to most rural areas, are fundamentally car-dependent and cannot function without daily car use by a majority of residents. The only way for our society to consume less gasoline would be mass electrification of private transport.

And notably, even the recent increased popularity of EVs in the post-Model-3 era isn't manifesting in the data [2] in the form of decreased consumption to my eyes. Perhaps for every new BEV out there not using gas, five people traded the cars they used to drive for inefficient, huge SUVs.

1. https://www.inflationtool.com/adjusted-prices/us-gasoline

2. https://www.eia.gov/dnav/pet/hist/LeafHandler.ashx?n=pet&s=w...

3. https://lcau.mit.edu/research/american-suburbs-project

What is an "eco warrior"? It sounds similar to the alt-right term "social justice warrior". Is this on purpose?

I think you have the wrong end of this stick. See the Greenpeace vessel Rainbow Warrior for an example. There have been several iterations of this ship name since the first was bombed by the French secret service in 1985.

The term eco warrior, in the UK at least, long predates social justice warrior. As the peer reply says, it's long been applied to members of Greenpeace and I think I first heard the term in the late 80s or 90s. As they said, maybe it was because of their ship Rainbow Warrior which was sunk by the French government in 1985 and prompted Greenpeace to continue the name with future boats.

I don't think it particularly had a negative connotation until recently though, to me at least it was always just someone who had strong opinions about protecting the environment, and Greenpeace always had quite a lot of support from the general population and they weren't actively disrupting the lives of ordinary citizens in the way Just Stop Oil do for instance.

You may not have learned much about them, or thought through the potential costs of a pipeline being built through your property. Some of those 'eco-warrior types' are not protesting a pipeline, they are protesting the potential irreversable damages to their communities if a neglected or mismanaged pipeline springs a leak (and many, many have), or catches fire, or explodes. Many of them have already seen more than one result of cavalier energy company facilities that have ruined community water and food supplies. What will happen to their community if the pipeline doesn't go in? NOTHING.

> What will happen to their community if the pipeline doesn't go in? NOTHING.

Or a train derailment destroying the town. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lac-M%C3%A9gantic_rail_disaste...

The problem that the Dakota Access Pipeline protests were protesting was not the pipelines in and of themselves, it was the running them through their reservation, and that many pipelines have had leaks, 23 from the Keystone pipeline alone.

https://apnews.com/article/keystone-oil-pipeline-leaks-spill...

They didn't want an ecological disaster in their back yard, they didn't want their religious sites disturbed, and they didn't want there to be a risk that their water ends up contaminated with oil, and the pipeline company didn't want to pay the cost to navigate around the reservation.

So of course the government stepped in and forced the protesters to accept the pipeline and now idiots that don't understand the reasoning behind the protest mock them after the fact.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dakota_Access_Pipeline_protest...

> "biodiesel" which was lightly processed used cooking oil

No.

Biodiesel is fuel made directly from vegetable matter; typically it needs a ""special"" engine to run, or is blended in a low ratio with ordinary diesel (B7 in the UK and EU).

Processed cooking oil is made into HVO.

This can be used as a direct 1:1 replacement for ordinary diesel without engine modifications. Very green! Unsurprisingly, HVO has a higher price than biodiesel.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hydrotreated_vegetable_oil

HVO is easily available in the UK and is typically bought by bus companies and delivery companies seeking to improve their green footprint.

https://duckduckgo.com/?q=HVO+supliers+UK&ia=web

In the early 2000s I traveled thousands of miles in an old school bus fueled by waste vegetable oil (WVO). The system was very simple, the bus had an extra fuel tank with a heat exchanger to the engine coolant, a couple fuel filters, and some hand-operated valves in the engine compartment. You start on diesel, warm up and switch to WVO. Before shutting down you would switch back to diesel to purge the system. You also pack a box of extra filters because they'd need frequent replacement. It was a somewhat popular conversation in some circles. Old Mercedes Benz diesel sedans were a common choice.

Related. Others?

Just a Drop in the Bucket (1994) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19437905 - March 2019 (23 comments)

Love how many people were called over to provide expert advice on figuring out why diners couldn't enjoy the lovely outdoor seating without an adult on their nostrils.

Without a what?

Assault, presumably. Pretty soon we may find ourselves introducing autocorrect errors like that on porpoise, to try to show we're not AI.

That's not just a good prediction—it is literally already happening right now!

Certainly!

That won't work for long. I've already seen reddit karma farming bots that introduce typos into repost titles to avoid duplicate detection. It'll be pretty easy write a program that takes a piece of slop text and swaps one word or so in every few hundred with a typo just a small Hamming distance away.

Did you make a dolphin joke there? My eyes apparently now only read intent.

Evidently in the 90s facesitting was a popular pasttime in Palo Alto.

Maybe I should get my eyes checked because I was like I don't see it, looks like what I meant to write to me. It took the other commenters for me to finally see it. Ah yes assault not adult there...

That was a fun read. Thank you

Reply on news.ycombinator.com