oil spill
Posted on | June 8, 2009 | 12 Comments
i thought i’d blog about this because it’s going to happen to most soapmakers sooner or later.
today it happened to me.
i was lifting my usual 11.4 (that’s just a squeak over 25 lbs for the imperial measure folks) kilo bucket of oils across the floor and up onto the bench where i do my mixing, just as i’ve done about a million times before over the last 6 years….and i sort of suddenly lost my grip on the bucket.
as i gazed in horror, the whole thing went into greasy slow-motion, the bucket tipped sideways and all of the oil just fell out.
and started to spread.
and spread.
and spread, over my smooth sealed concrete floor.
my brains were paralysed for a few seconds, but i’ve anticipated this for ever, so i wasn’t frozen for too long.
we grabbed newspapers and rags and mopped up as much oils as possible.
this was a slippery, messy, hellacious stage, where it became increasingly difficult to move around.
standing on rags seemed safest.
then i poured the lye mix intended for that very batch of oil, onto the floor.
i did this gently and from low down, so there was no wild splashing or waves.
we both grabbed brooms and started to scrub the lye and oil residue.
soon we had lovely wads of very alkaline soap forming everywhere.
the next stage was to scrape up the soap.
we did this with one of those big rubber squeegee things for floors and a dustpan and brush.
then we poured hot water and started mopping.
when 99% of that was mopped up, we poured white vinegar all over and mopped that up.
a final rinse with hot water and a squeegee and the floor was extraordinarily clean, quite dry and not a trace of oil anywhere.
i threw the oily rags into the sink, then threw some of the “soap” from the floor over them and gave them all a good agitation in some hot water.
the whole ordeal took about 30 mins from oleagenous mishap to finish and was an excellent workout.
it works your entire leg trying to stand upright on an oil or soap covered smooth floor!
Comments
12 Responses to “oil spill”
Leave a Reply
June 8th, 2009 @ 9:30 PM
Yikes!
Thank goodness for your quick thinking.
June 8th, 2009 @ 9:41 PM
kallia….it worked out very well. i’ve had years to think about it and prepare for it. now having actually done it, i wouldn’t change any of the steps. it was cleaned up pretty fast and we got alllll of it.
June 8th, 2009 @ 11:22 PM
bet your floor is all clean now! what a friggin’ mess.
June 8th, 2009 @ 11:29 PM
it was horrendous! i would have loved to have taken pix, but we needed to move fast…and once you were IN the oil, it was just impossible to get OUT of the oil. we had to clean our way out!
June 8th, 2009 @ 11:45 PM
Hm, guess you could eat off your floor now. I would have been cursing like a sailor. I glad you mentioned about the lye – I was wondering if that would happen. I wonder if kittie litter would have absorbed all that stuff too…
June 8th, 2009 @ 11:49 PM
there was some cursing…..
June 8th, 2009 @ 11:57 PM
That is an ingenius solution!
June 9th, 2009 @ 2:20 PM
GAH! The horror!!
Smart way to clean the floor
June 9th, 2009 @ 11:17 PM
Sounds like that was handled just right!
quick thinking even if it has played out a hundred times in your mind when it happens look out.
The book I just got is The Garden Party and other stories by Katherine Mansfield. It does not have the pretty paper on the ends, I found a lot of books BY the authors but not on the list on the Web site. This one came from the libray in Henderson, NV which is 450 miles away. I am enjoying the writing style and the stories are quite humorous.
Michelle in NV
June 9th, 2009 @ 11:18 PM
I love the Live Traffic Feed!
June 10th, 2009 @ 6:43 AM
So sorry to hear about the spill, but you’ve provided excellent tips for cleanup. I had this happen to me once, I’m sure it will happen again.
June 10th, 2009 @ 7:02 AM
i read katherine mansfield at school….she grew up in NZ, so of course she was on the reading list, along with ronald hugh morrieson.
RHM is one of my favourite authors ever and he died youngish too, with only a handful of darkly hilarious novels under his belt.