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
John Vonderlin says:
April 21, 2014 at 9:51 pm
“Portland is …merely responding to a disturbed public.”
Well, you got that part right. 🙂
This article got me thinking about some of the wildlife in the area which must come into contact sooner or later. Some may even poop nearby or drop dead in the reservoir. Apparently
————-
PLEASE dump the water into the Colorado River, Lake Mead is extremely low and any water will help!
“I never drink water. Fish [snip . . nuh uh, not here they don’t . . mod] in it.”
— W.C. Fields
After draining the reservoir are they going to scrub the bottom with Tidy Bowl?
Somebody needs to take the piss out of this guy.
General Jack D Ripper had the right idea.
It is interesting to note that the same thinking that led the officials in Portland to drain out hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of water has led them to believe the consensus view on global warming.
The only thing I can think of is “Schildbürger”. It’s a series of tales about a city named Schilda, where the citizens do the strangest and most illogical things.
For example: one story goes how they transport wood over a hill. they carry it up, and carry it down on the other side. Then they accidentally drop some of the wood on the way down. They realize that rolling it down is faster than carrying it down.
So what do the good citizens of Schilda do?
They carry all the wood, including all of what they already transported down the hill, back up the hill and roll it down.
Will blunders never cease… Portland deserves a knock-knock…
Knock Knock..
Who’s There?
Urine…
Urine who?
Urine my reservoir, now go away….
(sorry….but somehow they deserve it)…
“Edohiguma says:
April 22, 2014 at 1:03 pm ”
Reminds me of Alice’s Restaurant, and the Grand old Duke of York:
“and with tears in our eyes we drove off into the sunset looking for another place to put the garbage.
We didn’t find one. Until we came to a side road, and off the side of the side road there was another fifteen foot cliff and at the bottom of the cliff there was another pile of garbage. And we decided that one big pile is better than two little piles, and rather than bring that one up we decided to throw ours down.”
…
“Oh, the grand old Duke of York,
He had ten thousand men,
He marched them up to the top of
the hill and he marched
Them down again.
And when they were up they were up.
And when they were down they were down.
And when they were only half way up,
They were neither up nor down.”
Sleepless in Seattle, pointless in Portland…
========================================================
This statement may be misunderstood. While chloramines will maintain a residual longer than free chlorine, it is less potent and requires a longer contact time to be effective.
Someone please correct me on the time factor if my memory is faulty here, but say a given residual of free chlorine would take 10 minutes to disinfect a gallon of water, the same residual of chloramine might take 30 minutes or more.
“Jim Francisco says:
April 21, 2014 at 9:40 pm
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!”
Well, they call Los Angele LA-LA land, they call Chicago Chi-town, why not call Portland P-land?
“Leonard Jones says:
April 21, 2014 at 6:39 pm
… and what I will always think of
for the rest of my life every time I pass a candy rack in a store and see a Snickers Bar.
I challenge anyone reading this to think of anything else!”
Payday?
They need to completely protect their water supply. As it stands they are allowing a very potent greenhouse gas to enter the atmosphere. Their disposal effort will not keep this gas from entering the atmosphere. They have to ensure that the contaminated water will not enter the ocean or the entire world will be contaminated because to do so will contaminate all sea life. Then there is possible contamination by birds, particulate matter and toxic gasses like SO2, CO2, and methane to name just a few that could effect their water storage facility. Now they need to completely sanitize the entire water supply system to include all plumbing in their city. In the future they should only put carefully distilled water into their water system. How much is all this going to cost?
Australopithecus afarensis, Neanderthals and others ran out of bottled water.
Reminds me of the Arrowhead Beer commercial on Youtube.
At the time, I didn’t think it was TRUE!
The Arrowhead Beer commercial is a play on the old Olympia “It’s The Water” ad that
featured a kid pissing the lake.
PS since someone else quoted W.C. Fields, here is another joke.
A buddy of mine on an out of town job came to my hotel room and told me he
was just kicked out the hotel by the manager. I asked why he was kicked out?
He replied peeing in the pool. So I went to the managers office to argue on his
behalf. I told the manager a lot of people pee in the pool.
The manager replied “Yeah, but not from the high dive!”
My husband was a restaurant manager during the summer in college as he worked on his Food Science degree. An older gentleman, apparently some type of water snob, asked him, “What kind of water do you serve here?” To which he quipped, “We serve the wet kind, sir.” Very technical description.
Astronauts have to drink their recycled/filtered urine.
Cold in Wisconsin says:
April 22, 2014 at 8:21 pm
Cold in Wisconsin,
I grew up in Green Lake County WI. As a kid, we often drank the local creek waters and lake waters. One spring when I was maybe 12-13 years old, on a warm day when old snow is still found on the north face of hillsides and creek banks and the creeks are running cold and fresh, I had taken a long ramble across across the ridges south of my parents and grandparents farms. As I headed back north, I dropped into a creek bed and bellied down on the old dry grass along the creek for a long cold drink. After drinking my fill and wiping my face with my wetted bandana, I headed up the creek a bit looking for spring run suckers (red horse fish). We used to catch these by hand, when I was a kid, great fun!
As I slowly worked my way up the stream looking for fish in the small bank under cuts and waving weeds, I came around a little bend about 50 feet from where I had had my long drink. There, lying half in the creek and half out, was the rotting carcass of a long dead deer! Uuuurrrpppp! I had to ‘swallow’ several times to keep my loooong cold drink in place…… but it did me no harm otherwise.
That water was ‘the wet kind’ also.
Mac
Thanks for posting this… Drives me crazy too….
3 PPB is in the ultrapure water level of water quality..The reservoir consists of ground water. The water hardness is about 90,000 PPB which is considered moderately (5 grains) hard…
It’s chlorinated for crying out loud,,
People in charge that are this ignorant is downright dangerous….
Makes me laugh when I think of Muslim Fundementalists quenching their thirst on Jesus’ piss [albeit strongly diluted!]
“Tom Murphy says:
April 22, 2014 at 3:51 am
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.’” ”
Does anyone remember Namephreaks of Herb Caen (SF Chronicle)? Nick Fish making a decision on water dumping? (Another fish story?).
They cannot just dump the water because it is infected. They cannot risk infecting any other bodies of water, the water table, or the oceans or they will have to disinfect those as well because they cannot take the chance. They must disinfect every molecule of what is in that body of water no matter what the cost because they cannot take chances They need to take this insanity to its logical conclusion. Most likely traces of such waste products have found their way into Portland’s water system so every pipe or surface that has ever come in contact with that water must be thoroughly disinfected and the entire system must modified so that this type of thing can never occur again. In the mean time all of Portland must be supplied with distilled water because their entire system is contaminated.
“Highly toxic disinfection byproducts (DBPs) form from reactions between pool disinfectants and organic matter, including hair, skin, sweat, dirt and… urine. In a new study, researchers mixed uric acid from human urine with chlorine and found it creates two DBPs: cyanogen chloride (CNCl) and trichloramine (NCl3).2
The former, CNCI, is classified as a chemical warfare agent and is a known toxicant to your lungs, heart, and central nervous system. NCl3 is linked to lung damage.
As for how dangerous this is, practically speaking, the researchers found that, in a worst-case scenario, urine in a pool might lead to about 30 parts per billion (ppb) of cyanogen chloride, which is well below the 70 ppb used as the maximum cyanogen concentration allowed in drinking water, according to the World Health Organization (WHO).”
http://articles.mercola.com/sites/articles/archive/2014/04/26/urine-chlorinated-pool.aspx?e_cid=20140426Z1_DNL_art_2&utm_source=dnl&utm_medium=email&utm_content=art2&utm_campaign=20140426Z1&et_cid=DM43506&et_rid=500965479