Athenian Still Grappling With Aftermath of Dishwasher Blaze

As the kitchen staff prepared for lunch on January 31, the chefs smelled the burning of rubber and quickly spotted a cloud of smoke rising from behind the dishwasher. The Main Hall has experienced several unexpected mishaps in the past months, including a power outage only two weeks earlier. The newest of the bunch, the Main Hall’s kitchen fire, caused a school-wide evacuation and the fire department’s involvement.

According to Executive Chef Miguel Aguilar, the overall damage to the kitchen was not too abundant. “Besides the broken dishwasher, there was only damage to a few electrical plugs that we still can’t use.”

Without a dishwasher, the Athenian kitchen still serves school food without regular plates or silverware. Athenian’s Chief Operating Officer Keith Powell said, “The school runs through about twenty thousand dollars a week on compostable paper goods.”

Miguel explained the next day’s aftermath. “The day after we still used our regular plates but we had to wash them all by hand. We have a very thorough system that we have to follow because of the health department. But the second day after we were lucky enough to have the paper plates.” Miguel said.

The increasing normality of school-wide emergencies is raising a concern for many people. When asked about the correlation between the power outage and the kitchen fire, Keith said, “There’s actually no correlation between the two that we know of. But a building this new shouldn’t be having this many problems. So we’re curious about that. We’ve been having conversations with the builders and some of the original electrical contractors just to try and see if there was something that was done wrong during construction that may be causing some of the issues, but it could just be a string of bad luck”.

Miguel also shared the daily issues that come with not having a dishwasher. “Thankfully there weren’t too many big challenges. The biggest thing is, even though we have paper products right now, we still have to wash all the pots and pans that we cook with. And with the big metal containers that we put the food in to serve. We have to wash everything by hand which takes about an extra hour of work every day,” Miguel said.

Keith said, “We had to spend a few weeks running diagnostics to see if we could have the old dishwasher repaired. And after a couple of weeks or so of evaluation, we knew we had to replace it. But you can’t just buy a dishwasher of this model and size, you have to have it built, and that process takes around six weeks. We’ll begin building the new dishwasher in about two weeks. The dishwasher will cost about fifty-five thousand dollars to build.”

In the end, Miguel shared the kitchen staff ’s surprising outlook on the situation. “The next day, when I came in and everyone was fine, they said it was fun for them. It was crazy but since nothing like this had ever happened before, it was crazy fun for them.” Miguel said.