A North Myrtle Panera Bread flooded with stinking water, floating matter. Why did it stay open?
CORRECTION: This story has been updated from an earlier version to reflect comments from Panera Bread stating that a plumber told officials the clogged drains did not connect to sewage lines. Some language in this story has been updated to attribute descriptions of smells and sights to employees’ account of the restaurant flooding.
The closed dining room probably didn’t give drive-thru customers at a North Myrtle Beach Panera Bread much warning of what was going on inside.
But on the other side of the drive-thru window for three hours Monday afternoon was an employee standing stinking wastewater that contained what some employees described as floating feces, employees told The Sun News.
“Through all that time, there was all that right underneath the drive-thru window. Our staff had to step into all that, and they’re handing people food at the same time,” said Christopher Richards, who was the a shift supervisor at the restaurant at the time but quit the following day.
Panera Bread officials say that a backup of wastewater and grease from a clogged grease trap caused the unsightly flooding. The restaurant says the clogged drains were not connected to sewage lines or to any place that would have contained fecal matter.
The incident at the Panera Bread located at 1296 Hwy. 17 N., North Myrtle Beach, began around 2 p.m. Richards, who was working in the kitchen, started to notice that water was bubbling up from the drain below the drink fountain near the drive-thru window. At first, he got down on his hands and knees and tried to clear out the drain, thinking it was clogged. Then he noticed there was a large chunk of what he said appeared to be feces floating in the drain as well.
After about 10 minutes, he and his general manager realized the entire kitchen was flooded, and so were the bathrooms.
The entire place smelled like sewage, Richards said, even in the lobby, which remained mostly untouched. Panera Bread officials said a plumber told them the floodwater did not come from sewage.
“I will probably never forget that smell. It was horrible,” Richards said, “especially being bare-armed into it. Our gloves only go so far.”
Asked if any of the wastewater came into contact with food customers received, Richards said, “Oh, it’s very possible — very possible.”
The store’s general manager shut down the lobby and apologized to the customers who were there and asked them to leave.
However, the store itself didn’t close. To do that, the general manager needed permission from his district manager. But the district manager wasn’t being very responsive and failed to give explicit permission to close the store, according to Richards and a current employee who corroborated his account. The current employee asked not to be named in this story because for fear that they could be fired. The restaurant’s general manager did not respond to a request for comment.
Richards left around 4:40 p.m., having already been working for close to 11 hours, and went home to shower “for a good couple hours” until he could feel genuinely clean again.
“I couldn’t stay there anymore. I couldn’t stand the smell, and I had it all over me, so ‘I gotta to leave,’” Richards said.
Until after 5 p.m., the restaurant stood in limbo, Richards and the other employee said. It hadn’t gotten formal permission to close, so the employees kept working, knowing that they were likely endangering the customers they were serving food to given the hazardous waste present in the food preparation areas, the employees said.
Richards said he watched their general manager beg for permission to close the store immediately but fail to get it until the district manager arrived.
Federal and state health and safety regulations and recommendations require in a situation like this that a store be immediately shut down to protect both employees and customers until the area can be properly cleaned and disinfected.
The South Carolina Department of Health Environmental Control states that in the event of a flood, which includes wastewater backups, “If there is an imminent health hazard or safe operations cannot be maintained, your Retail Food Establishment (RFE) must discontinue operation.”
Yet, the restaurant didn’t do that for at least three hours.
A plumber arrived around 5 p.m. and fixed what he could before advising to the general manager that the store itself should close. Around the same time, the district manager arrived and agreed to close the store.
Then, the store’s employees and the general manager proceeded to clean up the restaurant as best as they could, mopping up the wastewater and shoveling the floating materials into buckets wearing make-shift hazmat suits. While they worked, the district manager stood by and watched, Richards and the other employee said. Once they made decent progress, however, the district manager did do something. She called a professional biohazard cleaning service, which employees said should’ve been called in the first place.
Attempts by The Sun News to locate the restaurant’s district manager were unsuccessful.
In a statement, Panera said it was a “clogged grease trap” that caused flooding in the kitchen. The issue has since been resolved, the company said.
“We temporarily closed the cafe to complete professional sanitizing by an outside cleaning service and are now reopen for our guests,” a representative for Panera said in a statement. “The well-being of our associates and guests is always our top priority.”
Panera said there was not a biohazard danger in the store due to the flooding because the drains in both the kitchen in the bathroom were not connected to the sewer line.
Generally, most kitchen drains first flow to a grease trap, and the lines in most cases eventually connect to the municipal sewer line, said Jim Meyer, a mechanical engineer who is licensed in South Carolina and has worked across the country for close to 50 years. As for the bathrooms, most building codes require that the drains connect directly to the sewer line, Meyer said.
Richards came back to work the next morning, Tuesday, and said the place still smelled like sewage no matter where he turned. After a few hours, as he worked on a catering order, he decided he’d had enough. He said he couldn’t stand to work in a place that had treated its employees like that, a place he said endangered not only its employees but also its customers.
“Monday was definitely my breaking point. I came in Tuesday. I did have a catering order. I was putting it together and I’m like, ‘I really don’t want to be here,’” Richards said. “I put my keys on the desk, and I’m like, ‘Hey guys, I’m done.’ And I just walked out.”
Richards figured it was only a matter of time before he would have ended up in a situation like his general manager faced. A former package handler for UPS, Richards said that company had strict protocols for whenever it shipped hazardous biomaterial, and there was hazard pay if an accident did occur. He didn’t see that Monday at Panera.
“Because if they do that to my manager and I was already helping put my hands in most of that dirty water, if I stay, they most likely have me do it again eventually if that ever did happen,” he said. “So I’m like, ‘No, I don’t get paid for this. I don’t get hazard pay. We don’t get paid for this. No.’”
This story was originally published October 29, 2021 at 1:55 PM with the headline "A North Myrtle Panera Bread flooded with stinking water, floating matter. Why did it stay open?."
