The Old Safeway (1955)
Recently I worked in what was,in 1955, the state of the art Safeway supermarket. Later it became the not so state of the art Grocery Outlet. Because of its run down state and archaic refrigeration equipment ,that cannot easily be updated, it currently sits empty.
Let's go down into the basement.
We were hired by Lodi Utility to take care of an oddity in their system which presented itself as a potential big problem. In 1955 they put the transformer ,that drops the high utility voltage down to a usable service voltage, down in the basement and then built the store over the top of it. The Problem: if or when the transformer eventually goes out, there is no way to get the old one out of the basement or a new one in. This would put the buisness out of power for a very long time while they would have to completely change how the building was fed. Being that there is no current tennant, the utility company saw this as a great time to do this, so as to prevent an emergency situation in the future. The funny part was, as soon as they shut off the power so the we could do the work, one of the main components of this very flawed system broke. We were just in time!
This is the old service that is now refed as a subpanel.
Another oddity, a stairway that goes up into..... nothing!
A new 1000amp sevice and utility transformer now sit outside of the building (a much better plan). The old tranformer will have to remain (abandoned of course) in the basement.
