First ten minutes
- Kill the water. Dish machine off, sinks off, no mop-bucket dumps. Every gallon you add comes back up.
- Contain, do not flush. Absorbent, towels, a squeegee toward a bucket. Pushing it to the floor drain moves the grease from your floor into the city’s sewer, which is the one place it is actually illegal to be.
- Cone it off and clear the line. Grease on tile is the fall that closes a kitchen for a week.
- Call for an emergency pump-out and say “overflow.” Mention whether any of it reached a drain.
The reporting clock
Richmond’s pretreatment rules treat an accidental release that reaches the sewer as something the city must hear about: notify the DPU Pretreatment Program within 24 hours of a known release at (804) 646-3000, with a written report within 5 business days. A small trap overflow mopped off the floor is not a sewer release. A large one that went down the floor drain is, and reporting it yourself is cheaper in every sense than the city discovering it downstream.
Why overflows happen in Richmond kitchens specifically
Older buildings in the Fan, Church Hill and Shockoe Bottom run undersized indoor traps on lines that were never designed for a fryer station. Those traps hit working volume in weeks, not months. Richmond does not hand you a pumping calendar — it holds you to a 100 ppm discharge limit — so the interval has to come from arithmetic. The calculator does it; the overflow is what happens when nobody did.
After the truck leaves
Keep the receipt and manifest. If the health department or DPU asks about the incident, a dated full-evacuation record the same day is the difference between a note and a citation. Then set the interval the calculator gave you and shorten it by a week for the first cycle.