From ARStechnica and the stupid, it burns, department comes this ridiculous story of a bureaucrat gone off the rails. See the video that set off this pissing match below.
The city of Portland, OR will empty a 38-million gallon reservoir after a teenager allegedly urinated in it, according to the Associated Press. It’s the second time in three years that Portland is flushing its Mount Tabor reservoir after a urine-related incident.
The reservoir is open-air and sits exposed to all of nature, leading many parties to question how necessary a draining would be, or how polluted 38 million gallons of water can really be by a single man’s urine.
David Shaff, Portland’s water bureau administrator, reserves a special disgust specifically for human urine. In 2011, when Shaff drained the reservoir following a urination, he reasoned to the Portland Mercury, “Do you want to be drinking someone’s pee?… There’s probably no regulation that says I have to be doing it but, again, who wants to be drinking pee?” This time around, Shaff wrote in a statement, “Our customers have an expectation that their water is not deliberately contaminated.”
A half-liter of urine dumped in a 143 million-liter reservoir would get a urea concentration of about 3 parts per billion, according to Slate. (We calculated it would be a 50 nanoMolar solution.) Meanwhile, the EPA allows concentrations of arsenic in drinking water up to 10 ppb (never mind eating asparagus).
This all came about over this video showing a man taking a leak in the reservoir:
Gasp! And, fish pee in the water of that reservoir.
Source: http://www.ask.com/question/do-fish-urinate
Maybe David Shaff, Portland’s water bureau administrator, doesn’t realize they have a water treatment facility for drinking water? From the Wikipedia entry
To treat the raw water, the bureau uses a process called chloramination, which disinfects the water with chlorine then adds ammonia to prolong the chlorine’s effectiveness.[28] Although these additives kill microorganisms such as coloform bacteria and giardia that can cause disease in humans, they can react with naturally occurring compounds in water to form other compounds such as trihalomethanes. Under provisions of the SDWA, the bureau monitors the levels of disinfectant byproducts to ensure that they remain under the maximum limits set by the United States Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) and enforced by the Oregon Department of Human Services (ODHS).[29]
Since 1997, in response to targets set by the ODHS, the bureau has been adding sodium hydroxide to the water to reduce its potential for corroding lead and copper in home plumbing. The treatment, which makes the water less acidic, has resulted in “at least a 50 percent reduction in lead at the tap… ”. The target pH range is 7.8 to 8.0.[28]
#idiot
Funny!
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Maybe Portland should just issue the kid a retroactive permit? After all, his discharge was already treated by a biological system.
Sean Hannity Interview:
“Heaven is for real”…
http://commoncts.blogspot.com/2014/04/heaven-is-for-real-hannity-interview.html
No biggy. Watermelons will love this because they don’t want that water in anything but a river heading pellmell for the ocean. All water MUST stay in the river. MUST!!!
Too funny. The year they put up fish screens and disallowed irrigation ditches to flow all season in Wallowa County was the year the salmon stopped spawning in all those ditches. We used to shovel them out of the ditches. Now they can only spawn in the main channel instead of the nice gravelly bed of smaller ditches. I am sure they like the main swift channel MUCH better.
Now the next problem. We don’t have as many salmon as we used to…
Oh…wait…
This reminds me of the story about Arizona Snowbowl’s plans to use treated waste water for snow-making to keep the local economy humming in lean years. The NY Times and others wrote very slanted articles about it calling the water sewage. An employee of the treatment plant posted a comment stating that he would drink it because of its purity and that it was currently being dumped into the river where it improved the water quality. http://www.nytimes.com/2012/09/27/us/arizona-ski-resorts-sewage-plan-creates-uproar.html
It is scarier that the administrators of the City of Portland are allowing this complete moron to proceed; again.
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A peecture is worth a thousand words.
Doug Jones says:
April 21, 2014 at 6:59 pm
>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>
You sir, are an evil genius.
(Meaning wish I’d thought of that and wish my kids were still young enough that I could use it on them).
“A half-liter of urine dumped in a 143 million-liter reservoir would get a urea concentration of about 3 parts per billion, according to Slate. (We calculated it would be a 50 nanoMolar solution.)”
Well yes, but if you put the problem in terms of Hiroshima bombs you’ll understand how truly serious this is.
🙂
Is it “Funny Friday” already?
This thread is not my cup of tea.
Earth has been around for several billion years. Life has been present on the planet for a good proportion of those billions of years. Most of that life has been passing the water of the planet through its various biological processes pretty much continuously for all that time. If you believe you can find water to drink on this planet which has not made numerous passes through various biological units, probably way to numerous to even attempt to count, you are suffering with terribly irrational delusions.
Philip Peake says:
April 21, 2014 at 5:31 pm
“Just a sign of the rampant lunacy that is endemic in Portland. I sometimes think there must be something in the water.”
Anthony should collect these zingers and sell them. I laughed till I cried with this one. I was thinking that I will avoid going to Portland. My wife said she wants to go there.
Take my wife — please!
Wow, I can remember being appalled when I took my first river trip down the Grand Canyon in 1979 that we were specifically instructed to PISS IN THE RIVER. This was a major adjustment because I’d spent much of the prior decade hiking and climbing around the American west and being specifically instructed to never do the same within 100 feet of any water.
The GC rules are still very much in force. Human urine is very nearly sterile. Some tiny viruses and prions can get through the kidneys in parts per billion which in that lake become parts per gazillion.
Before this beaurocrat will drink any of this water it will be halinated with Chlorine and maybe Fluorine (lovely elements) at a ppm or more. Otta killem.
This is the power of taboo.
Wow the stupid does indeed burn. Do they think animals carefully move away from the water before peeing or craping? Thats what the water purification plant at the output of the reservoir is for.
What are they going to do with all the puddles that will remain after they drain the reservoir? Declare them piss-proofed?
While a quick visit to Wikipedia’s articles on Urophagia and Urine Therapy will probably make those critical of the bureaucrat’s actions more incensed, I support his action. While the young man is now claiming he only pretended to urinate in the reservoir, it still remains a public perception problem, as several other commenters have noted. Thanks to a rainy winter, Portland is not wasting a vital resource, but merely responding to a disturbed public. When while dining in a fine restaurant you realize the caper in your pasta is instead a rat turd, I’m not sure many of us want the waiter to point out that nearly every food product has allowable limits of insect fragment and fecal contamination. Their tip is going to be related to the depth of their apology and the haste that they retreat towards the kitchen with the offending platter. I’m not sure that a public servant should be held to a different standard. I’d also mention for no particularly good reason that the only thing worse than biting into an apple and seeing a worm, is biting into an apple and seeing a half a worm. In finishing, I’d scold whoever above maligned my beloved Snickers candy bar, with whom I just celebrated my Diamond Anniversary. They were probably actually thinking of a Baby Ruth, with its undigested peanuts.
Massive waste of a critical resource.
Pee reviewed the latest Mann paper.
The draining of the reservoir because someone urinated in it is even crazier than this blog claims.
First, unless the person has a kidney or bladder infection, human urine is sterile.
Second, the excrement from Oregon’s wildlife enters the reservoir. In particular giardia and cryptosporidium, both having much more relevance for human health than anything in a teenager’s urine.
Have a read of this report of water quality in Oregon. The persons responsible for the order to drain the reservoir does not appear to read the Portland Water Bureau’s reports or if they read the reports they do not understand their relevance to public health.
URL: http://www.portlandoregon.gov/water/article/244813
It is well known by many in London that the water they drink has been filtered by up to 7 sets of kidneys before it gets to them. In hot dry summers the flow on the Thames is little more than the outfall from one sewerage treatment plant to the intake of the next water treatment works. I think it’s called using water wisely.
James Bull
I imagine that Portland taxpayers are plenty PO’d at Shaff. Oh, bad pun! Bad Larry! *slaps own wrist*
It is a absolutely ridiculous waste, but 38 million gallons (117 acre ft.) is close to insignificant. For example Californians Lake Shasta reservoir is currently holding 2,400,822 acre ft. (62% of average storage, what happened to the worst drought in history?)
Imagine all the bird fly-over doo-doo. Don’t they treat their water?
James Bull says: April 21, 2014 at 11:07 pm
That’s complete Bazalgette I’m afraid!