The Great Madison Butter Fire!!!

I swear, this kind of shit can only happen in Madison.  Had Sea Squirt not mentioned this to me today I would have had no idea this actually took place.  I  thought he was yanking my crank at first.  Then I did a Google search.  Yep, the Great Madison Butter Fire is real and the pictures I found of it are just plain bloody frightening.  Think napalm!!!

Twenty years ago today a fire broke out in a cold storage warehouse owned by Oscar Meyer.  The building was the size of a football field.  Inside was 20 MILLION pounds of butter and an equal amount of lard, cheese and hotdogs.  The place was an accident just waiting to happen.  And it did.  BIG TIME.  To the tune of over $100,000,000!!!  And that's in 1991 dollars.

This turned out to be the biggest and most expensive fire in Madison's history.  This was the deep fryer fire from hell by all accounts.  Every fire crew in Madison got involved.  And we all know that nothing works better on a grease fire than water...  It took them two full days to get the fire under "control" and another full week to finally get it put out.  Several fire trucks were totaled due to grease saturation and all of the fire men's  uniforms needed to be replaced because they were soaked in butter.  That cost of uniform replacement alone was over $500,000!!!

One fire man described it as tsunamis of melted butter.  Another fire man was actually trapped up to his neck in a hole full of melted butter and hot dogs.  This  clogged the storm drains with melted cheese and lard.  Apparently when the hot dogs started exploding they came shooting out of the collapsed roof like tracer bullets and flew more than a block away.  Residents in the area described it as smelling like a tire fire.  Streets for two blocks around were impassable due to the "oil slick" and needed to be pressure steam washed when it was all over.  For several months afterwards the entire neighborhood reeked of rancid butter and spoiled meat.  There was so much grease coating everything that people's lawns and trees started dieing.  So much butter and lard went down the storm drains it actually caused a grease slick on the Yahara River and Lake Monona!!!  One report I read quoted the Fire Chief as estimating that they pumped enough water on this fire over the course of 9 days to actually fill the Yahara River several times over!!!  The clean up cost on this fire was staggering.

I can't make this stuff up.  Really.  Yes indeed ladies and germs, Madison truly is 72 square miles surrounded by reality...