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
Of course the water goes to a treatment plant before entering the supply. Flocculation (coagulation), sedimentation, filtration, disinfection and oxidation.
What matters is the quality and safety after treatment. This pee has absolutely no effect obviously. Just a PR exercise.
I bet, just after they empty it, they will claim there is a water shortage because of global warming,
“This means that while the chances are that most of the water in your soda has never been in another soda, almost all of it has been drunk by at least one dinosaur.”
http://what-if.xkcd.com/74/
Nobody has yet mentioned rotted carcasses from both plants and animals, mostly after falling in the water and the mainly fungal processes used to rot them into soluble solutions. When the reservoirs run low, people are drinking stuff that scraped along the mud banks containing creatures most would run screaming from if they saw them in their glass.
My local reservoirs have few higher life forms living in them due to the tannins washed into them from the moorlands above. All from rotted plant life. nobody has yet ascertained any human peat bodies are preserved there but I guess a goodly few are undiscovered.
Urban legend has it that Londoner’s drinking water has already passed through seven other people’s bladders by virtue of the more upstream towns on the Thames!
When Harvard and the city of Cambridge needed water, they bought the water rights in small farming towns outside the city, and then proceeded to tell the farmers what they could and could not do. Officially you were not even allowed to wade in a brook. The farmers had too few votes to mount any sort of resistance. Therefore it was quite common to express contempt by peeing in a brook, and muttering something like, “Drink that, Harvard.”
The last of these farmers were vanishing when I was a boy in the 1950’s, when their towns were being transformed into snob-suburbs, however one memory of their contempt still remains. They didn’t think the “Commonwealth” of Massachusetts cared for the common man, and therefore when what now is Route Thirty was renamed “Commonwealth Avenue,” they refused to adopt the name. To this day “Commonwealth Avenue” becomes “South Avenue” at the Weston border, and then becomes “Commonwealth Avenue” again on the far side of town, at the Natick border.
There’s a reason for drinking beer.
I only drink pure water free of every impurity. Just pure H2O. It is expensive, but it tastes better than any other drink especially when chilled.
The guy pi**ing in the water supply should be put in jail because *his intent*, given that he does not know chemistry, is to make people drink his pi**. I.e. to taint the water supply. Which is a conspiracy to commit a huge crime. Although his lawyer would argue that he is too dumb to conspire to do anything.
As for the reservoir, the answer is simple. We should build a massive array of solar panels over the top of it. This will keep urine out and will produce clean energy to heat Al-Gore’s swimming pools with.
So now they are going to cover the lake? H-m-m. Will they have the perimeter guttered to catch the runoff? Where will THAT stuff get treated or should we landfill?
We need to run down the rabbit hole on this a bit more as the public needs safeguarded at all costs.
NPR reported on this last week, and even they questioned the logic of the decision as conveyed by City Commissioner Nick Fish. Fish is quoted as saying, “The professionals who report to me all said, ‘Dump the water. Don’t take any chances.’” I’d like to know the names of those professionals. They need to have their certifications suspended, pending the completion of remedial training and successful passing of a competency exam in industrial hygiene and public health. And Fish should probably be fired for gross incompetency – or stupidity.
The EPA limit for nitrates (the testable component of uric acid or pee) is 10 mg/L (or 10 ppm or 10,000 ppb) – http://water.epa.gov/drink/contaminants/index.cfm#List . With the reservoir being 38 million gallons in volume and urine already consisting of 95% water, the guy would need to urinate 1.3 million gallons in a single voiding in order to achieve the 10 ppm “contaminated” concentration – http://www.slate.com/blogs/the_slatest/2014/04/17/urine_in_portland_reservoir_how_dangerous_is_pee_in_drinking_water.html .
Ignorance in action – especially considering portions of the west are experiencing drought. They should ask if any drought stricken community would like some pee water provided they cover the transportation costs. But that wouldn’t be as dramatic as dumping the water.
Robert Bissett, ” urine is semi-sterile”. The kidney produces an ultrafiltrate. It rarely lets even protein out. Unless you have a bladder infection, urine is essentially sterile.
City Commissioner Nick Fish
and what does he do in the water?
I don’t see Christopher Monkton in the comments. Would this be because the Portland pee concentration would be billions of times as concentrated as the active ingredients in the homeopathic medicine he advocates. To demonstrate the power of homeopathy, Monkton apparently is the world’s only inhabitant to be cured of Graves’ Disease, treated by his own medicine. By minimising the concentration of pee relative to the water, you all are showing how powerful the poison is, and how right the Portland supervisor is.
Skeptics! Next you will be telling me that 97% of scients don’t believe in homeopathy!
This is not simply a case of idiocy. This is a case of someone with an OCD in a position which allows his condition to dictate irrational work decisions, increasing the buden on the local taxpayer. The guy should be moved to a position where his condition cannot do further damage – or else he should be forced to get help.
However, it does beg the question: where are this guy’s superiors in all this? Surely someone higher up should be overriding such insanity?
suffolkboy says:
April 22, 2014 at 12:50 am
Urban legend has it that Londoner’s drinking water has already passed through seven other people’s bladders by virtue of the more upstream towns on the Thames!
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One of them is me. I wonder of any of the other six are reading this.
Let’s not even mention to them birds poop in the water…
If this _is_ treated water the idiocy is compounded. Throwing away the considerable resources used in making it potable is just irresponsible.
I spend a fair bit of time away from proper plumbing and am amazed at how touchy people are about their waste 😉 I did 8 months at a stretch living outside and when I did get back to civilisation it felt odd to go to a special little room to do what I needed to do 😉
On exped, your own fresh urine is fine for flushing a wound, if there is a shortage of drinking quality water and certainly safer than river water.
And Adam, you sound as daft as Shaff, are you from Portland?
i have always wondered why cities store TREATED water in an open reservoir.
why bother treating it first if you are just leaving it in a situation where it easily becomes just like it was before treatment.
glad I got a well and a generator for power outages.
My Bobby lies over the ocean
My Bobby pees into the sea
My Bobby lies over the ocean
Don’t bring back my Bobby’s pee to me…
Don’t bring back, don’t bring back
Don’t bring back my Bobby’s pee to me, to me
Don’t bring back, don’t bring back
Don’t bring back my Bobby’s pee to me
Last night as I lay on my pillow
Last night as I lay in my pee
Last night as I lay on my pillow
Ok, I’ll stop ‘fore anyone crucifies me
Dopes. Much of the water taken out of the Mississippi down south for treatment has gone thru many sewage plants. That’s what the treatment plants to make it drinkable are for. Duh.
SasjaLr says: April 21, 2014 at 5:34 pm And what about bird droppings and other stuff that end up in the same water …?
Ah, there’s the difference! Animals — good, natural. Humans — bad, un-natural. Only today’s confused culture could laugh at all religion but somehow retain the concept of original sin.
“A half-liter of urine dumped in a 143 million-liter reservoir would get a urea concentration of about 3 parts per billion”
It’s even stupider than that. Most of the half liter is water. Urine contains about 1% dissolved solids.
This is the “purity” mindset that views things as either clean or dirty, but the real world is always dirty. Please don’t tell them that fish die in a lake.
In Chicago we get our water from Lake Michigan, which not only has people who pee in the beach water while swimming, but has MILLIONS of fish that die each year, as well as boats on the water. OMG!!!
It may not be real science, or real smart, but it is real money. When we stop laughing, we can consider the economic wisdom of having a significant part of our economy in the hands of this pathetically unqualified person.
Hate to bust the bubble but there are no fish in that reservoir. It is basically a holding pond for potable water sitting on the side of mount Tabor. Mount Tabor is basically a park and is a hill about 300 to 400 feet high above the surrounding landscape which is all city. My daughter lives about 12 blocks from there. That does not excuse the rank stupidity of the socialist elite that are in charge there. There are some civilized areas in Oregon (not including Eugene, Salem, or Multomah county.