June 20, 2011
headline of the day
Eight million gallons of water drained from reservoir after man urinates in it
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comments:
- Joel Bernstein: I know right?
- Rick Neece: Being nice is a dainty way to put it.
- Rick Neece: Hey Cristopher? Who cried “uncle” first, at the end of your ten-year stand-off? To quote my...
- Michael Smith: Ours is the kitchen.
- Amy Mabli: That’s what happens when you give the dogs the bed.
- Deron Bauman: Sweet Jesus.
- Michael Smith: Don’t we all.
- Pam: I have a story coming out soon in a ‘little mag’, Chicago Quarterly Review. An old friend recently...
- Pam: And I thought, somedays, that my work was meaningless…
- Pam: I remember Eggleston at the Art Institute in Chicago a couple years ago. He was elegantly dressed in a dark suit...
- Christopher Walken: Hey Clusterflockers, Realize y’all are hurting. I’ve been a really close friend of my...
- Marco: This works pretty well in mobile, more so in iOS
- Michael Smith: It was not the intent of management to imply all sissies are “namby pamby”. Management was...
- Rick Neece: I take umbrage with the term “namby pamby.” Some sissies are fierce.
- Carole Corlew: Shelia. Happy no big deal day. I would start your very own post but this phone is in semi rebellion.
Is this national news now?
International, the link is to a U.K. paper.
Goddammit.
This was the stupidest thing ever.
He should have to pay for it. All $36,000.
I don’t really see what the issue is. I mean, half of Portland probably drinks their own urine anyway.
Kelsey: $36,000 for peeing in a pond? Doesn’t that seem slightly harsh?
If David Shaff thinks draining the reservoir is so important, he can pay the $36k.
I don’t disagree. I just think since they already drained the reservoir in response and it’s going to cost taxpayers $36,000, that man should pay it.
Thought experiment: if it had cost the city a million dollars to drain it, should he be on the hook for that?
All’s I’m saying is that ever since I saw the video that Roger Ebert posted on his blog, I have been laughing over the Portland Water Bureau official’s statement.
“I can imagine how many people would be saying, ‘I made orange juice with that water this morning.’ ”
Also, sheesh. The poor pisser. Being publicly identified by a caption reading URINATED IN RESERVOIR.
And I agree with Ebert. I would have looked the other way and saved the city some money.
He was interviewed on the news! With that caption!
He’s trying to blame his intoxication and the fact that he thought it was a sewage plant? Water doesn’t smell like sewage.
Urinating in a public water supply should be penalized. Sure, the dilution factor means the reservoir didn’t need draining. Sure, that politician was just afraid of public outcry. Maybe the pee man doesn’t pay the full bill, but his fee should teach him (and others) a lesson.
I don’t have a problem with the public shaming, or with charging the guy a reasonable fine.
I have a problem tying the size of that fine to the degree of the city’s overreaction. It sets a bad precedent for city officials.
Ah. Okay, I can understand that.
Dammit, I was having fun arguing.
Be less rational next time.
Lesson learned.
In all seriousness, I’m with Joel with respect to the city’s overreaction. Before he made the orange juice speculation, the Water Bureau dude referred to “the yuck factor.” Actually, I am wondering how the whole thing went public in the first place. A minor transgression. Public urination. Chicago Cubs fans do that in people’s yards all the time. Some get busted, and they pay a fine. Probably even spend a night in the lock-up. And that’s fine. This isn’t the fifteenth century. The norm is that you don’t take a whizz out in front of everybody and frighten women and children. And you don’t pee in the pool nor in the municipal reservoir. It might set a precedent, and then you’d have “floater incidents” and swimming pools and reservoirs would become cesspools.
I guess that now I’m mainly wondering how this minor incident became such a big deal.
The thing you have to understand is that Portland is big into homeopathic medicine, so the more the urine is diluted, the stronger it becomes.
Wait a minute. Okay. I realize the RESERVOIR URINATOR was probably stumbling home from a party or a bar, and before he left, a voice in his head should have asked, “Honey, before we leave, do you have to go?” But what do people do when their bladders are bursting and they are not out in God’s great outdoors? I remember once driving to a club in LA one night with my ex- and a friend, and it was a long drive, as LA drives tend to be, and our friend had to pee, and we still had maybe half an hour to drive before we reached the club. So we stopped at some restaurant or business and the owner said, “Sorry, for customers only.” And our friend said, “C’mon, man, have a heart.” Nope. So our friend went out and took a leak in the alley, which he really did not want to do.
I think that if we don’t want people peeing in public (or in drinking reservoirs), we should build public peeing facilities.
Our late night public peeing facilities generally turn into late night homeless person sleeping facilities. Which probably means we should be spending more on the latter.
Thank you, Joel! Now it all makes Portland sense.
Also, though I do turn to homeopathy (**clusterbomb**), I know a good joke, and that’s pretty damned funny what you said about dilution.
Wow, Portland is more like the Driftless Region than I’d thought. Our late night public peeing facilities generally turn into late night sleeping facilities, too. Like, for me and the raccoons and coyotes. When I’m on the lam.
Okay. So. Peeing facilities that people can’t use as sleeping facilities. Urinals and such, shielded from view by a screen, but not enclosed.
Did nobody consider selling that eight million gallons of water to California? We probably would’ve paid for that piss-water and used it to water all that produce the rest of the country buys from us.
I assume the $36k figure was the cost of draining minus the revenue of selling it to someone.
Well, here in the Great Lakes region, we don’t need to buy nobody’s pee-water and we’re holding our own water. So to speak.
The water wars are going to be ugly.
I’m thinking I’ve figured out how to solve any of California’s future water shortages. We’ll just send a bunch of Californians up to Oregon to pee in their reservoirs and get caught, then we’ll buy the “contaminated” water for a song.
The only problem with my plan is that it would require money, something else this fine state doesn’t have. Maybe we could pee on some Oregon state income tax withholdings too.
Piss is a great renewable resource. I’m thinking we can put it to use one way or another.
I agree he should be held responsible in some way (I was thinking a fine), but draining the whole thing seems like an irresponsible knee-jerk reaction. The “yuck factor” is not sufficient. After all, there’s probably a dead fish or two in there. My (unsubstantiated) guess is that somewhere nearby, there’s a farm or factory that has polluted that reservoir with something far more substantial than 6-8 ounces of urine.
Don’t tell Deron, but I peed in his water supply today. And I’m not paying nobody nothing.
What about all the bird and other animal elimination in that water supply? Isn’t that why municipalities bomb the water with chemicals like chlorine? The other day I read something written by a doctor that said raccoon feces are full of deadly parasites. I bet that reservoir woods is teeming with raccoons…
Every time I’m at the Scroggins’s I water supply in their pee.
Urine is very good for plants. It supplies nitrogen and other good things, diluted to keep from burning the roots. Or so I’m told. I promise that is not something I am doing. Planting field peas is much more modest. I wonder if the male version would scare off those little chipmunks that go after my produce…
The category is itself a critique.
Cece, don’t you go flinging no field peas into a public water supply.
You know, it wasn’t until y’all started talking about fish poop and bird shit that I noticed it’s an open reservoir. The only public water supplies I’ve seen are contained and covered, with collecting points for rainfall.
Dallas gets its water from public lakes that people do all sorts of things in.
That guy seriously sounded very contrite in his article. And I can see how you’re wandering by what looks like a lake, and you’re like “Haha water I will pee in that. What’s up, water!?” But mostly he sounded really sorry about it and said he would pay for it but he didn’t have a job. I think a fine of $500 or LESS would be completely reasonable.
And yes, that was my main problem with the shaming, Kelsey is that it’s an open one so birds poop all over it, and other gross animals put their bodies in it, so one tiny bit of human pee is literally the least of their worries, and isn’t it filtered before it goes into drinking water supply? Why are they so CRAY CRAY.