I started off the dreary, rainy morning with stripping the Hemlock and Maple cabins. I took out the dirty laundry, dropped that in the basement, then made the bag of clean laundry for each and dropped those in the cabins. The bags will sit there until the cleaning girls come on Wednesday.
When I was in the house making lunch, around 2 p.m., a customer came into the lodge and said, "We have an emergency in our cabin. The oven was on fire." He explained that something in the oven's broiler pan was on fire and the flames were so big that they had to use the fire extinguisher. I went over there quickly to see the entire cabin in a cloud of smoke, ash and powder. We opened windows, turned on the fan, and I checked out the stove. It was too hot to touch, so I used a towel and opened the broiler pan. There was something there that was about a foot long, inch thick and 6 inches wide that had burnt severely. Maybe a cleaning rag? I carried it out and put it on the sink. It wasn't smoking anymore and the oven was a real mess.
The customers said that they had not used the broiler pan at all. So that meant that I had missed something in the broiler pan after the cleaning girls had cleaned the cabin. Sometimes they forget to clean something, but it is up to me to inspect the cabin and make sure everything is clean. So ultimately it is my fault that something was left in the broiler and we didn't notice it.
So when the customers turned on the oven to cook a pizza, the heat of the gas flames ignited whatever was in the broiler. When they used the extinguisher, they pretty much emptied it out. So I had at least a half inch of white powder everywhere, some places an inch thick, to clean up.
There was powder on and in some of the cabinets, drawers, floor, counter, table, everything on the first floor and up in the loft. I spent 3.5 hours cleaning it up, pulling out the oven to clean behind, under, around, new comforters for the beds in the loft, dusting, washing the floor, etc.
When I was just finishing up, and my arms were black with soot up to my elbows, we had some friends stop by. So she helped me load the cleaning supplies onto the ATV that John was driving, and we went into the lodge for some relaxation. I got the soot off my arms pretty easily and then sat down to chat for awhile.
John had been digging a hole by the Balsam cabin to install a new power pole. The old pole had been taken out by a tree falling in a storm. John had stopped to see if he could help with anything. I told him no and that maybe he could give the customers a beer or drink or something on us. He left to do just that.
Dave showed up later with the vacuum cleaner for me. I hadn't had it earlier because the power was out because of the electrical storm. So not only was I cleaning up the mess, I had to do so in the dim light. When the power came back on, Dave dropped off the vacuum. That made the job a lot easier. I had been using a wet rag and rinsing off the powder over and over. Now I could just vacuum it up. Yeah!
After I was done I tested the oven. It worked fine. In fact when the customers came back from town, they made a pizza. Thankfully the oven is okay. One of the customers complained quite a bit about the dust on the comforters so I replaced them. Then he made a snide remark about how we couldn't have dogs in this cabin but we could have bonfires in the stove or something like that. That wasn't funny.
It wasn't a good day but it could have been much, much worse.
No comments:
Post a Comment