Taming health risks in 30th Street Station's historic confines

When workers at Surf City Squeeze clean fruit for the day's juices and smoothies, they use a section of the sink where they also wash dishes. Though that might be usual practice at home, in a commercial setting it would be a health-code violation if the business hadn't secured special permission from the Philadelphia Health Department.

Surf City operates in Amtrak's 30th Street Station food court, where retailers and regulators have learned to improvise to fit modern sanitation standards into a historic building.

"The space is tight," said Eddie Martinez, assistant manager at Surf City.

After a scathing 2011 inspection, with 19 violations (including 10 in the food-borne illness risk category), the business closed temporarily for a cleanup and to install a new sink.

Still, if they need to wash equipment such as blenders at the same time they cut fruit, workers borrow neighbor Auntie Anne's sink.

"We work together whenever we need to," Martinez said. "It just makes sense."

An Inquirer/Philly.com review of city health inspection reports at the railway eateries found that, on the whole, establishments there do better than the citywide average for food safety and cleanliness.

But they also fight problems like rodents, which are hard to control in an old building with little real physical separation between businesses.

On average, inspectors found 1.3 food-borne illness risk violations per visit at eateries inside and near the station in 2013. That dropped to 0.8 in 2014. Compare that to the citywide average of 2.3 food-borne illness risk violations last year at eat-in restaurants.

The neoclassical 30th Street Station, which opened in 1933, is on the National Register of Historic Places. Its creamy travertine ceilings and brass doorway trimmings hark back to an earlier time when the health importance of proper hand washing wasn't so clear.

It is now known that improper hand washing "caused 89% of outbreaks in which food was contaminated by food workers," according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. The most common outbreak nationally is norovirus. Establishments with certified food service managers proved less likely to cause outbreaks in a study the CDC conducted.

Finding enough sink space is a perennial problem that leads to health violations - 23 of them across the facility since 2009.

The tight confines of the kiosk setups affected Saxbys Coffee, as well. The corporation recently took over the location, triggering an inspection.

"Basin sink is also used for dispensing liquid waste from portable mop bucket," a serious violation, the inspector noted.

Saxbys responded by requesting permission from Amtrak to overhaul the space, which it planned to do at some point anyway, but the reports made it a priority.

"We are completely replacing the entirety of our 30th Street kiosk," Richard Rollier, Saxbys vice president of operations, said in an e-mail. "The age of the kiosk and some of the equipment occasionally inhibit efficient operations. [We] feel the new kiosk will set a bar for the future of retail in the station."

The historic space is so challenging that some citations don't seem to make much sense. For instance, Saxbys was dinged for not having a sign near the toilet alerting employees to wash their hands.

But the kiosk has no toilet.

"We sought and received permission [from Amtrak] to rectify" the issue, Rollier wrote.

Which means Saxbys bought and installed the signs for the bathrooms used by all the merchants, fixing the problem for all the tenants.

Rodents are another kind of challenge. Inspectors have cited more than a dozen establishments a total of 26 times for evidence of rodents since 2009 - just a handful a year.

One business that hasn't had a serious violation in three years is Bridgewater's Pub. But owner Leslie Spellman says that doesn't mean the furry critters aren't lurking. "They are brutal," she said. "You can see them come out of the grates . . . it's a never-ending battle."

Spellman and her neighbors possess few weapons to control rodent entry. "There's no door on my place," she noted. And chemicals pose their own problems so close to food preparation. "No bait can be used due to cross-contamination," she said.

Bridgewater's front door is actually a gate. Though true to the building's character, it would not stop a cat, let alone a mouse.

What really can get an establishment into trouble is not the occasional mouse sighting, but any evidence of rodent contact with food surfaces.

Mark Weir, an environmental science engineer at Temple University's School of Public Health, said the concern is any "kind of infectious disease that you get from fleas, ticks, or mites that might be on the rats or mice. If you come into close enough contact, they can move their way to you, bite you, transmit whatever disease was in the rat or the mouse."

Inspectors cited Wendy's/Jersey Mike's in November 2014 after finding "fresh mice feces" on the floor. The recommended solution: clean the floor, install "metal door sweepers under doors to prevent vermin entry." Two months later, the problems hadn't been resolved, another inspection found.

The business referred questions to Amtrak. The facility's management provides twice-monthly extermination services, said spokesman Craig Schulz. Amtrak management issued a statement: "While the individual layouts of some store fronts do not permit complete separation from common areas, Amtrak works closely with all tenants to maintain a clean and sanitary environment in and around their places of business."

Sometimes rodents seem to multiply when fleeing nearby construction. Amtrak said the west plaza project "stirred things up for a period of time." In fact, inspectors saw about half of the droppings from 2010 through 2014 in 2013, when most of the work was completed.

Jason Gordon, who owns the Ben & Jerry's stand at the station, said he pays an extermination company to treat his business. "We won't keep food in our storage space" to keep from tempting rodents, he said.

Another common problem inspectors found: Not having people certified in restaurant sanitation on site. That has accounted for 20 violations since 2009 in the building. Weir says training is what prevents most problems.

"Training is just one of those things that ingrains the knowledge in you," he said.

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