Long long ago, I worked in a fast food place. We had a walk-in refrigerator. It didn’t have a lock or anything, (in fact I think it may not even have had a proper door,) so there was no chance of someone being trapped in there.
But suppose someone had accidentally been locked into such a thing. Since it’s above freezing, does that mean they’d have no problem (except problems of comfort) surviving the night? Or can prolonged exposure to cold temperatures above freezing also present the possibility of injury or death?
I have no idea what the temperature was inside the thing, unfortunately.
You will certainly eventually die of hypothermia without the temperature being below freezing, particularly in water - you can die of hypothermia in a tropical ocean, eventually. I don’t know how that applies to a fridge.
A refrigerator would be at most 40 F. There is nothing special about freezing with regards to hypothermia. You won’t get frostbite at 40 F, but you could still get hypothermia.
Spending a night at that temperature is certainly possible if you are properly dressed. People do it all the time while skiing, etc. In typical fast food worker attire though I would guess that you would at least require hospitalization by the next morning.
A walk-in cooler is probably at about 40 degrees Farenheit.
Survival time in 50-degree water is only about one to three hours, depnding on a host of variables such as your overall health, your weight, whether or not you know any cold water survival tactics, etc. A frail person might only last three hours in 75 degree water.
This site says that water will pull heat out of you 25 times faster than cold air. You can’t just take the survival times for cold water and multiply them by 25 to get a survival expectancy for plain old cold air - nobody is likely to die if the room air is 70 degrees, but in 75 degree water, a skinny person in poor health may well die in three or four hours.
That said, if you’re in decent health and wearing something more than a t-shirt and shorts, you can probably survive a night in the cooler. I’d advise sitting on boxes, rather than the metal or tile floor, and even building a cave with boxes if there are enough to shield you from air currents and trap a small bit of warmish air around you.
Anecdotal, so take it for what it’s worth, but I’ve posted it before and I’ll post it again: during the winter, I maintain my apartment at a temperature in the mid-to-upper 30s, as measured by my trusty desk thermometers. (Used to be thermometer singular, but I bought another once a certain group of internet skeptics started questioning the original’s veracity.)
I routinely sit in my computer chair at this temperature for hours wearing boxers or, er, less, and I’ve suffered no ill effects to date. I don’t believe I have any superhuman powers of cold resistance, I can tolerate heat just fine as well, and I have an about-average build. So, my answer to your question is: speaking from personal experience, yes, you can survive for a night in walk-in cooler temperatures, and indeed much longer than that.
I’m sure that someone more medically knowledgeable than I will be along shortly to speak of the dangers of doing this, but then, if I were to listen to those guys, I should have been dead years ago for any number of reasons.
That doesn’t help if some moron leaves something heavy in front of the door. I work in the freezer section at a Wallyworld, and this idiot (who was fired shortly after this) left a pallet of juice right in front of the door while I was in there (some of the juice had broken, and the grocery claims area with a hose for clean up is right by the freezer). He went on lunch for more than an hour while I was stuck in there. Thankfully, I had on a nice heavy coat, gloves, hat, and boots, so it wasn’t too bad. I did end up building an igloo out of the boxes on top of an empty pallet in there, since I didn’t know how long I was going to be stuck.
Of course, kids get trapped in junked refrigerators and asphyxiate. If it’s a small enough walk in, well-sealed, and the refrigeration system merely recirculates the air inside, I wouldn’t want to be stuck in there for the weekend or anything.
I once had a job where I had to work the entire day inside a walk-in refrigerator (about 35-40 deg). I had to wear an arctic parka and mittens; I spent the whole day cataloging medical test samples. My handwriting got steadily worse and worse over the shift as my hands grew colder.
Rat fetus…check. Pig fetus…check. Sheep foreskin…check.
I was allowed out for the legally required breaks and lunch, but wow was that the suckiest job I’ve ever had.
For just 25 cents a day, you too can prevent temp worker abuse.
I was talking to the manager of my local Shop-Rite store today, and I asked him what was the red light way up in the open truss area of the ceiling. it was above the courtesy desk, and he said that store personnel were trained to glance at it from time to time. It tells when anyone is in the meat department walk in freezer. Sure enough, I saw it come on and off a few times as I shopped. I guess it means more at the end of the day.
…no butcher left behind…
My family owned a food distributorship, and the warehouse had several of these walk-in freezers. They all had big pushrod devices on the inside, which you could use to unlatch the door and open it.
There was a hole where you could put a padlock on the latch to keep it locked; years earlier my family had locked a padlock into one of the holes, so it could not be locked from the outside, and only my dad & uncle had keys for that lock.
They also had a small hole drilled through the cooler wall, with a cord running through it to a bell mounted above the coolers & near the office. So if anyone ever got locked inside, they could ring the bell to attract attention.
That was many years ago, no doubt modern coolers have a built-in intercom, or some warning device like ltfire describes.
In case anybody’s curious, a cell phone won’t work in a walk-in; I’ve tried. I’ve never seen a model where the condenser and fan controls weren’t on the inside of the unit, so the first thing I would do is shut those off. The temperature will rise about 7 – 8 degrees an hour as soon as that happens. Corrugated cardboard is an outstanding insulator, so the next thing I would do is start tearing boxes up and stuffing the cardboard up under my clothes, and try to fashion a hat of some sort. Then I’d start eating every carbohydrate in the fridge. Some idiot (and it won’t be me) will have a nice mess to clean up the next morning when the place opens.
