The Great Warehouse Fire

Early one morning in mid December back in the late ‘90s, as I recall, the employees of the City of Seattle complex known as 805 S. Charles St. arrived at work to find a wondrous sight in their normal parking lot.

At the time, employee parking was about an acre or two of land underneath the southbound Airport Way exit from I-5, at the base of the shore where Beacon Hill on the east and Dearborn street on the north sloped down into what had been tide flats in the early days of the Duwamish Delta.

On this particular morning, as I pulled in to the lot, there was a pile of stuff down the center of the lot that was close to 10 feet high by 30 feet wide and at least 50 yards long.  As I watched, another Engineering Department dump truck pulled in and backed up to the growing pile and added another 14 yards of consumer goods to the pile.  As the driver told the gathered employees, there had been a fire the night before at a warehouse in Sodo that was used to store piles of consumer goods waiting for the holiday shopping season to commence.  In the process of fighting the fire everything was damaged by smoke and water, so they cleared the building, which was done by scooping up everything with a front loader into a series of dump trucks, and our parking lot was the closest available open land to the warehouse.

I gazed in wonder at the pile.  There was a tent; no there were a hundred tents!  There was a pool cue in a case; there was a baseball bat, a sleeping bag, an umbrella, a huge pile of stuff, all brand new there on the ground in front of about 25 guys.  It was getting close to starting time, and everyone was here.  We looked at each other and, without a moment’s hesitation, threw ourselves at the pile.  Guys were coming out with armloads of stuff that they threw into their open trunks, then scrambled back for more.  The man with a pickup was king in a situation like this.  One guy filled his station wagon, then drove home and emptied it into his garage, then came back and filled it again.  By that time, an unfortunate security guard from a private outfit had been dispatched to stand over the pile, and word had spread throughout the neighborhood.  People were coming out of the woodwork.  Standing at a vantage point halfway up the back driveway to the shop, it looked like nothing less than one of those nature shows on TV where the ants are swarming around the corpse.

The security guard would stand at one end of the pile and politely chastise those who were rooting through the damaged goods, whereupon their buddies would be in full scavenge mode at the other end of the pile.  The guard would see this and walk to that end to repeat his ineffectual warnings, while the folks at the first end would dive in headfirst.  Christmas had come early, with a vengeance.

By the time the claims guy had mustered enough backup security to stop the looting, the pile had shrunk about 20 per cent, I’d guess.  They had to scoop it all back up again back into the same dump trucks and haul it off to South Transfer Station, where the scene was no doubt repeated minus the security guards.

So, were we thieves?  Did we steal?  I guess we did, really.  At the time it felt like a windfall out of the sky, and nobody raised a hand and said, “Excuse me, folks, maybe we shouldn’t be helping ourselves to all this largesse, eh?”  Somebody could have said, “Naw, it’s all on someone’s inventory, and the insurance company is gonna pay off, but they won’t go broke, and we’re just helping them out by reducing the pile they have to pick up again, so where’s the harm?”

It says something about how we deal with things that have no value left.  None of the stuff in the pile could have been sold as new after that, so they discarded it.  Why couldn’t they just give it away?

I asked that same question once after a Seahawks football game at the Clink one time.  Aramark is the vendor that has the concessions on all floors there, and we were part of a group that staffed a food booth to raise money for our high school football team around 10 years ago.  At that time, and I assume it’s still the case, we were told to throw out any leftover food at the end of the night.  In our case, that meant about 25 hot dogs, 15 burritos, a few chimichangas and some prepared salads all went into the garbage can in our booth, as every other booth on all floors at the stadium did the same.  I asked at the training session why they couldn’t donate the leftover food to the Union Gospel Mission three blocks away, and suggested the mission would be glad to bring a van over and load up.  The response was legal liability prevented that, somehow, some lawyer’s fever dream turned into a nightmare of wasted food.  We were told we could only take the leftovers home in our stomachs, so of course I stole two burritos on the way out every time that season.  One time I was accosted by a panhandler on the way to my car after a game, one of those scruffy far-gone wasted individuals with few teeth who can barely form a coherent sentence in the best of times.  I asked him, “Are you hungry?  Want something to eat?”  Of course, he didn’t, he wanted money for drugs, but he couldn’t say that, so he nodded his head.  I whipped out a still warm burrito that would have cost him $5 at Taco Del Mar, or $11.50 inside the stadium and said, “Here, eat this!”  His partner stumbled to his feet about then and I asked him, “You hungry too? Here!”, and whipped out another one, which he took with a stunned look on his face.  Then I walked on.  At least they ate well that one night.

Both of these incidents are connected by the idea that value is separate from price.  In both cases, the warehouse goods and the leftover food are being discarded, not because they are worth nothing, but because whoever owns them can’t make any money selling them.  The warehouse fire was a rare event, but the food waste happens at every event at every stadium throughout the country, if they all operate with the same bureaucratic mindset, a mind boggling tonnage of perfectly good food going to the landfill.  I hope at the very least they compost it these days.  And I wonder, why can’t they give it away?  Why, why, why… :-{)}