The day was like any other day at Cedar Point. I worked an opening shift, I wrote the rove sheet, I had to chase Spelling Bee around, I had to split chatting employees up and so on.
It was a really hot day. It was probably the hottest day of the year. It must have been about 95 degrees. With the heat index, it was probably easily over 105 degrees. It was hot, humid and miserable. On days like this, I told my sweeps to stop and drink lots of water. I didn't mind them in the break area if they were drinking water. I'd rather have them stop and drink water than pass out.
My sweeps stayed well hydrated. It was a different story for guests.
I was making my rounds, and I just walked by maXair. I was heading toward the front of the park when I saw something strange on the ground. It was right in front of a flower planter near Johnny Rockets. There was a pool of red substance sitting on the midway.
Because it was near Johnny Rockets and the people in foods have never been the best at working, I assumed it was cherries. Johnny Rockets puts cherries on top of its shakes and malts. The cherries, like most cherries you find on ice cream, most likely had red food coloring in them to make them appear redder, so the dark red color didn't get much of a reaction from me.
In my three seasons at the park, the people who worked as base-rate employees in foods never seemed to work well. They'd leave messes, they'd smoke on the midway, they'd break park rules. Because of my experiences with this, I assumed some foods person was taking a shipment of cherries to Johnny Rockets, droppped a container on the ground, then left it there for someone else to clean up.
Oh, how I wish that was true.
I stood over it and examined it. Was it cherries? What else could it be? It couldn't be blood. That's crazy. There's too much there to be blood.
A guest walked up to me and asked me what it was. I told her it was spilled cherries. Maybe I was humoring myself.
I decided to do the old sweep 'n' sniff. It's a method insane sweeps like me learn if you're unsure of what a substance is. Sometimes guests will eat an Icee, go on a ride and throw it up immediately after. Because it just went down, it looks like an Icee after it's thrown up. An Icee is easy to deal with: You just sweep it away with your broom and let the sun evaporate it. The rain will clean the stain, if there is any. If it's vomit, we have to get the oil dry. To test which it is, we'll sweep our broom through it quickly, bring it up to our nose and smell. If we recoil, we get the oil dry.
I brushed my broom through it and brought it to my nose. It didn't smell like cherries. I glanced down. It was slowly trickling downhill from the pile. This midway had a slight slant to it.
That's when I realized what this was. It was blood. Human blood. And I had to clean it up. But I couldn't get the blood kit because guests would step in it. I had to wait around until one of my sweeps or supervisors came by.
Then I saw the second pile. About 10 feet away was another batch of this stuff. A larger pile. I noticed a tiny spot of vomit leading into the blood. It looked like someone may have seen the blood and thrown up because, hey, this was disgusting.
Hey, a guy can dream, can't he?
That was not the case. Upon closer inspection, the vomit led into the blood because it was
from the same person. Someone threw up, and what followed was blood. Lots of it. Two piles.
I got on my radio and called my supervisor. I told him to come to Johnny Rockets. We're not supposed to tell them to go places. We're supposed to call them and tell them why we need them. I was not leaving this spot. I called my supervisor, and he told me to call him. I said, "Negative." Come to Johnny Rockets! He told me to call him. I said negative. I could not leave.
Then I saw one of my sweeps. The Minor. Excellent! She'd always wanted to clean blood, and now she was getting the ultimate chance. I signaled to her and waved her over. I showed her the mess, told her to keep people out of it, and I went to a phone.
To put this in perspective:
She got excited and did as I told her. I called my supervisor on the phone and told him the severity and size of the situation. He said he'd come by with some blood kits.
During all this craziness, the person who made this mess threw up in the Johnny Rockets bathroom. Because it's such a health hazard, the guests were removed from the restaurant, and the doors were closed. My friend from the zone next to mine and a restroom attendant went into the restaurant to clean it. Usually a group called Safety cleans up messes inside buildings, but they were so backed up driving people to First Aid that they couldn't clean the restaurant. Because the day was so hot, people who weren't drinking enough were passing out, so Safety was out all the time getting people to First Aid, rehydrating them, letting them sit in air conditioning and so on.
Anyway, my supervisor gave one blood kit to the guys in the restroom, and he gave me two other kits. The restrooms team leader heard lots of traffic on the radio, and she asked me if I wanted assistance. "Affirmative!"
She came to my side to help. OK. Now we had to start cleaning this mess. We opened the blood kits, put gloves on, put goggles on (I'd never had to put goggles on for blood before), and we got the disinfectant oil dry out. This special oil dry was in small containers. There was not enough in three blood kits to cover the blood.
As we stood around trying to figure out what to do, Chris came up. He probably knew that a lot of people gathered together meant something was going on. I told him to get a bucket of oil dry. He saw the pool of blood and went to get more oil dry.
Right about this time, Whore No. 2 walked up to me and told me about Spelling Bee. Yes, this was the mess I was working on while Spelling Bee was getting himself fired.
Chris came back with oil dry, we poured it on a pool of blood, and we needed more. Chris got more oil dry. Repeat.
More oil dry. Three small containers of disinfectant oil try and three five-quart buckets of regular oil dry later, and we had everything covered.
I decided to improvise and spray the disinfectant in the blood kit on the regular oil dry. Everyone decked out in the gear followed suit. Another one of my supervisors showed up to help. She only had gloves on, so she could only do minor things. She sprayed disinfectant, helped spread oil dry, and she kept guests away.
Head count! Myself, two team leaders, two supervisors, The Minor, Chris, a restroom attendant. Eight helpers. Eight helpers for the worst mess I've ever seen. How long was this going to take?
After letting the oil dry soak the blood up, we decided it was time for step two. Step two is getting the special brooms and dustpans. These aren't what we used to clean up trash. These are similar to what you use in your kitchen to sweep up dirt. You have to get on your hands and knees and slowly sweep the oil dry into the dustpan. Once it's in the dustpan, you pour it into a red bag marked "biohazard." After we have enough in the bag, we tie it off.
We filled all the bags that came with the blood kits. I believe it was five bags.
Right around this time was when I saw the person who made the mess. It was a guy in a motorized wheelchair. One of the scooter ambulances that had been busy all day pulled up outside Johnny Rockets. I looked up and saw them loading a guy from a wheelchair into the scooter. There were spots of blood on his leg. Obviously, it got on his leg from his mouth. That happens when you're in the sitting position.
This would explain the hard-to-notice tire marks between the blood spills. His wheelchair had rolled through the blood. We were able to follow it to Johnny Rockets. There was oil dry and disinfectant all over the place.
I got back to work on the blood pool. Because it was so hot, I was sweating like crazy. The goggles didn't help at all, and I actually got some sweat inside the goggles. While looking down, one drop of sweat landed on the goggles right in front of my left eye. You know what water does, right? It magnifies. So now my vision was screwed up. My left eye wanted to focus through a magnifying glass, and my right eye was focusing like normal.
Sweeping the oil dry up wasn't as easy as you'd think. Remember that I confused the spill with cherries earlier. How could I do that if this was just blood? It was more than that. There were chunks of something in the blood. Chunks of flesh? Stomach? I do not know. All I know is that they came from inside the human body, and they stuck to the hot midway like glue.
As we swept up the oil dry, these chunks stayed behind. Instead of simply sweeping the little grains into a dustpan, these suckers had to be worked off the midway. We had to run the broom over the chunks numerous times. They'd roll a bit, then they'd stop. This is what made this particularly difficult. Eventually we got them up and into the bags. It took extra oil dry and more disinfectant.
After we cleaned up the pool of blood and got all the oil dry in the bags, we realized that there was still work to do.
The blood had stained the midway.
I looked at one of my supervisors and told him we needed to deck scrub the midway. I was not about to leave red stains on the midway. Gross.
He came back quickly with a bucket they use in the restrooms; the type with the wheels on it. There were three scrub brushes in it, and he said a powerful cleanser used to clean the restroom floors was in the bucket.
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