Ancient Web: Milk.com Saved a 1994 Network Grease Story

Part of the Ancient Web Collection.

There is a kind of Internet story that sounds like it should end with a municipal investigation, a catastrophic electrical fire, or both. A September 1994 email preserved on Milk.com manages to avoid the fire, at least in its telling.

Read “Just A Drop In The Bucket”

The page is part of Milk.com's Wall O' Shame and presents a forwarded message headed “mother of all grease fires,” attributed to Brian Reid. Its timestamp is Friday, September 23, 1994. The copy explicitly shows signs of forwarding: an intermediary is credited and the sender's email address has been lost along the way.

The story describes an office building in downtown Palo Alto powered by a transformer inside an underground vault. Nearby diners complain about an unpleasant odor. Workers investigate what appears to be rancid oil and discover, the email claims, that the underground utility space has accumulated roughly 2,000 gallons of discarded deep-fryer grease.

The explanation is magnificently awful. A restaurant had allegedly been emptying used fryer grease through a grate for years, mistaking a transformer vault for a storm drain. Heat from the equipment kept the fat liquid. Crews reportedly shut down power and pumped the vault out before a potentially disastrous failure.

The story is worth reading as a 1994 circulated anecdote, not as a independently verified city incident report. The surviving webpage documents what the email said; it does not supply a utility-company record confirming the account.

Before the forward became a social-media post

What makes this particular survival valuable is the packaging. There is a subject line, an old-style date and time zone, attribution that has visibly deteriorated during redistribution, and a plain text narrative long enough to build toward a punchline about the day's fish special.

At the bottom, Dan Bornstein is credited with editing and converting the forwarded account into HTML. That is a tiny but significant act of early web preservation: ephemeral mail-list conversation becomes a permanent linked document.

The Wall O' Shame gathered material that could be funny, dreadful, cautionary, or simply unbelievable. This page captures one of the Internet's oldest pleasures, passing along a story because the details are too remarkable not to share, while leaving the reader to decide how much of it should be believed.

Today such a tale might be cut into a video with ominous music. In 1994 it traveled with a sender line and a timestamp. Milk.com kept the envelope.

Read the original forwarded account on Milk.com.

Part of the Ancient Web Collection.