The story comes from CNN:
Oregon’s Portland Water Bureau is draining an 8 million-gallon reservoir after surveillance cameras caught a man urinating into it this week. The move will cost the water bureau $35,000 — $28,000 in lost revenue and $7,500 in disposal costs, CNN affiliate KATU-TV reports. Is that worth it when the urine involved is really a drop in the bucket?
Health officials and toxicology experts say the draining is an overreaction, describing the health risks of some pee in the reservoir as “very, very tiny,” while city officials say scienctific facts are trumped by “the yuck factor.”
UPDATE: I tweaked some words in the quiz and apparently it started the quiz all over! Democracy has been compromised! Vote again!
Wtf, is the Water Bureau made up entirely of homeopaths?
@1 – That’s a good point. By draining the reservoir and refilling it, aren’t they making it that much more powerfully pee-tainted? The reservoir has memory and will never forget that pee; it should be paved over and forgotten. Time for a new reservoir, Portland, and next time, be careful what gets diluted in it.
Don’t birds shit/pee in the reservoir all the time? Or is it a no-fly zone?
Technically, everyone drinking anything right now should choose option #3, as all the world’s water has had pee in it shortly after the first organism developed a way to eject liquid waste.
/Poop too.
This is the stupidest waste of tax-payer money ever. Why is there even an ick factor? Did they immediately publicize it? What the public doesn’t know won’t hurt them, if what they don’t know about is 16 oz of pee.
You must recuse yourself as totally unqualified to form an opinion if you’ve never imbibed pee yourself. (guess what my vote was!)
The following betrays my ignorance: at what point in the city’s water cycle does that reservoir water stand? Has it been treated already? Jeez, just institute a boil order for a few weeks and be done with it.
“I’m drinking a tall glass of pee right now.”
LOL! Great 3rd option.
@7 It’s pre-treatment. The water goes from the reservoir to a treatment plant then enters the drinking water system. Reservoirs also serve a preliminary treatment function, allowing larger particles to settle and natural biological treatment to take place before the water enters a proper treatment facility. /themoreyouknow
Geez, drinking a little pee (which is biologically sterile) won’t hurt you – in fact, in survival situations it’s recommended that a small amount of urine be added to your water ration (roughly 15% by volume), particularly in warm climates, since the salts filtered out of your body by the kidneys will replenish some of the electrolytes you lose from perspiration & micturition.
It’s pre-treatment? What’s the big deal? And I’m gonna assume a RESERVOIR is outside – I would imagine the occasional bird flies over and releases some birdshit into it. And pollutant-filled rain, etc. Sounds goofy.
If they’re that fucking worried about it, they should spend the money building a fence, not on this nonsense. Fresh water is a precious natural resource. Think of the thirsty orphans in Africa.
This is going to make a good episode of Portlandia.
My guess is that the head of their water department (or whoever made the actual decision) is an ignorant beneficiary of political patronage.
@1 & 2: Nice tag-teaming!
Holy shit, that is moronic. What a waste of beautiful water, in addition to the tax $.
My drinking water comes from the Ohio River, downstream of ~2 million people peeing in it all day, every day (pre-WWTP and drinking water treatment, of course).
@12 I took a drinking water quality analysis course in college, and one of my fellow students asked what the typical setback was for a fence around an open-air reservoir. Totally deadpan and without skipping a beat, the professor said “farther than you can throw a dead cat.”
People up here are weird about reservoirs. I grew up in California, where many reservoirs are just lakes, public access and all. We’d waterski, fish and swim in them, and we let our dogs play in them. It’s not like people are drinking the water directly out of them with no treatment.
yeah wow, good thing (other) animals would never pee in or near a reservoir.
let’s hope no one tells portland that some of the farm workers didn’t wash their hands before picking the produce in their markets.
Now if someone had dropped some liquid LSD in the reservoir….
On AM1000 this morning, the reservoir guy said “we find dead animals in it all the time. But, we don’t drain it for those. This is a special reason.”
WTF?!
@17,
People down there get pretty upset when water quality gets poor enough that the reservoirs get closed. But if you live in that armpit also known as inland California, I can’t say I blame them.
Accidentally whizzed in the reservoir?
Better drink my own piss.
Most open-air reservoirs have fish and frogs in them too. Are they crawling over to the fence and pissing into the surrounding shrubbery before getting back into the water, or what? Jeez.
That reservoir jackass was on the PDX 11pm news last night as well. He said they obviously can’t drain it every time they find a dead mouse or duck in there, which happens all the time, but there is an ‘ick factor’ with this incident (presumably from the news coverage,) and that they have billions of gallons of water anyway.
@22 I live in Portland, and approve of your message.
I’ve read enough Savage Love to know that drinking a little pee is totally fine. My only hope is that it wasn’t his first pee of the day. Apparently thats the bad one.
Just fucking ignorant! Something is peeing in every body of water at least every hour.
It appears that Bear Grylls has voted 191 times as of this post.
@9 If by “treatment” you mean that that they spritz a little cholrine in it, yes. But Portland is famously one of the last cities not to treat (i.e. filter) its water.
http://www.portlandonline.com/water/inde…
To the thousands who sickened and died after drinking water from that reservoir I swam in that time in college, my most sincere apologies.
Isn’t EVERYONE in Las Vegas peeing in their reservoir? They get their water from Lake Mead, and the treated sewage is dumped back into Lake Mead:
http://www.snwa.com/html/wr_colrvr_credi…
So it’s literally true: what happens in Vegas, stays in Vegas, at least when beer happens!
Of course, everybody in Western Colorado has already peed in Las Vegas’ water supply. And downstream of Las Vegas is…Los Angeles! It’s no surprise that the thrice-pissed tap water in SoCal is not all that tasty.
Translation: Portland’s water managers are idiots, OOORRR…they’re angling for a budget bump to lid their reservoir.