The Great Atlanta Cookie Fire

Two dinghies were stolen over the weekend, so everyone’s sticking pretty close to home, watching their shit. In spite of that, I managed a brief luncheon in Isabela the other day. I rode with a group of gringos who are, oddly-enough, putting on a play here. As we passed through cattle country, I spoke with the guy seated next to me. It turns out he used to run cows in South Georgia; I did the same in North Florida. We discussed breeds and feeds, then got on the subject of animal rendering. That’s when this story from long ago popped into my head.
My buddy Jim’s dad used to own a chain of supermarkets in Miami. One day a guy showed up and offered to haul away all the meat scraps and trimmings for free from his meat departments that were stinking up his dumpsters. Jim’s dad was intrigued and wondered what the guy did with them to turn a profit. That’s when he discovered the rendering business. He was so impressed that he sold all his stores and moved to Atlanta, where he built a rendering plant. It had a big pit where the raw materials were loaded in. A jumble of pipes and noise connected it to the other end where two large metal tanks sat. One was for liquids, the other for solids. The solid was bone meal, the liquid, tallow; both animal feed ingredients. (Note: Tallow is also consumed by us hungry humans. That’s why McDonald’s french fries taste so good.)
I was living in Gainesville, Florida at the time. Whenever a major rock group would play Atlanta, a bunch of us would ride up there in a cloud of pot smoke. We’d stay with Jim and never miss the opportunity to visit the plant. The first time I went, I climbed up the side of a big semi-trailer and gazed at five hundred cow heads sticking their tongues out at me. Their wide eyes looked to say, “Why me?” On another visit it was a jumble of chicken feet; fifty tons worth.
Their business did so well that they thought up a new concept, bakery rendering. It utilized the same principal but was expected to smell a whole lot better. (The original operation’s aroma was best described as “interesting”.) Their plan was to acquire the waste that large bakery mills produced and redirect it from landfills to their factory. (These guys were “green” way before it was trendy.) The unsuspecting bakeries were even willing to pay them to haul it away. Contracts for the raw materials were signed and the plant construction began.
As happens often, the construction fell behind schedule, but the raw materials were on the way right on time. Semi-trailers filled with bread, crackers, cookies and the like were slated to show up manned by drivers eager to unload and return home in time to watch NASCAR. With no building to store them in, they rented a large storage unit and began dumping the stuff into it. More and more material arrived and the warehouse was soon full. In desperation, they rented a front-end loader and packed it tighter and tighter as product continued to show up at an alarming rate. A lot of this was coming in fresh from the factory ovens and hadn’t quite cooled. Those of you familiar with the composting process may know what happened next…. it caught on fire, from the inside.
The alert mini-warehouse manager saw smoke pouring out of their unit and called the fire department. When the firemen cut the lock and opened the doors, a smoldering, crystalline Vesuvius towered before them. Then they did something terribly wrong. They trained their hoses on it. 
Those of you familiar with thermal mechanics know that penetrating highly compacted material fused with sugar crystals is damned near impossible. It would be like trying to extinguish the sun. The more water they poured on it, the more smoke (actually steam at this point) it produced. The firemen decided no oversized cookie monster was going to get the better of them, so they brought in a second truck where the stream from two fire hoses turned into a torrent. 
Those of you familiar with basic science understand what happens when you increase an object’s volume. It expands. The Goliath began to grow before their startled eyes. With a resounding “bang” the rear of the building blew apart and the “blob” began an ugly march between the buildings.
My friends weren’t spendthrifts and hadn’t rented in just any run-of-the-mill warehouse complex. This one was state-of-the-art with a fully integrated drainage system that was located in an area rich in antique dealerships. Many of the other units housed valuable heirlooms awaiting the auction block.
The “blob” meanwhile wasn’t content to advance in a linear fashion; it entered the drainage system where it resurfaced inside the other units. Only when the humbled firefighters turned off their hoses did it stop its reenactment of Sherman’s March to the Sea.
The short ending is the owners swiftly removed the blob and all traces of its existence. They paid a multitude of fines and were barred for life from ever renting another storage unit in that county. They also purchased enough goop-encrusted antiques to redecorate the White House.
A year or so later after the incident, I returned to Atlanta where the punk-rock craze was in full swing and a club called "688" was hosting “The Stranglers”. I eagerly visited the gleaming new plant humming contentedly on a hillside and smelling like Candyland. Jim and I climbed up the side of a large tractor-trailer. It overflowed with Ruffles Potato Chips, the ones with ridges. Jim reached in, grabbed a chip off of the top and bit into it with a loud “crack”. He smiled between munches and said “Still fresh!”, right before he swallowed.