So Gary, Mark and I stood outside the store in the bitter cold, watching the firefighters move from shop to shop as police cars shut down York Road and firetrucks from Towson and Lutherville lumbered into the parking lot. “Look at those windows,” Mark said. “If this place blows up, we’re going to get sliced and diced.”
It started like any other day, except that I was on time. I sanitized a dough tray, poured some mushrooms into it, and started chopping them. There came a sudden high pitched noise from the back of the shop - it sounded like someone was pressure washing a car. I also noticed a nasty scent, but I knew Mark had gone out drinking Thursday night and figured his body was just purging itself. Across the back lot is Brooks Huff and a body shop, so while it would be odd that they would be washing quite this close to our shop, it also wasn’t entirely out of the question.
Gary walked towards the back anyway, muttering things not-nice about employees power washing shit outside his door. He opened the backdoor, looked to the left, said “Holy shit!” and let the door shut. About this time, the rather strong odor of methane gas struck Mark and me full force. “Time to go,” Gary said, and we made a hasty evacuation into the parking lot.
I called Zapp on his cell phone, to warn him not to park out back, but he was already walking around the corner of the building. He’d seen what had happened. See, the parking lot between us and Brook Huff isn’t very big. There are two lanes heading down, and sandwiched between those are some angled parking spaces and a dumpster or two. They are small parking spaces, yet some woman for god only knows what reason decided to try to wedge her Dodge Ram into one of them. When she left, she didn’t pay too much attention to what she was backing into - namely, a gas meter - which she totally crushed.
So there we all were, standing out in the parking lot, Gary on the line to the police, “Yeah, uh, there’s a major gas leak here…” There is one bright side to our location: directly across York Road is the Cockeysville fire department.
A couple of firefighters showed up in a smaller SUV-ish truck and started making a survey of the scene. Gary and I were BSing with Doug, the UTZ truck driver, when a woman pulled up in front of the bagel shop in a silver SUV, got out, and lit a cigarete. So the three of us - and the two older women from the Christian book store - start screaming “GAS LEAK! GAS LEAK! PUT OUT THE CIGARETTE!” She got the message, drove away, and blocked a firetruck from pulling into the lot. Not her day, I guess.
Within a minute, firetrucks were pulling into the lot, with the police close behind. A helicopter briefly circled in the sky, but then was off to greener pastures. So we stood in the parking lot for about forty minutes freezing our asses off before the leak was corrected and we were allowed back to work.
Too bad - we almost had the day off!
Oh, so anyway, that’s why York Road was shut down in Cockeysville for about half an hour.