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Why Portland Should Have Kept Its Water, Urine and All
Ars Technica has nothing good to say about the scientific understanding (or at least public understanding) that led Portland to drain 38 million gallons of water after a teenage prankster urinated into the city's water supply. Maybe SCADA systems shouldn't be quite as high on the list of dangers, when major utilities can be quite this brittle even without a high-skill attack.
literally.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
Urine gets stronger the more you dilute it.
The uncomfortable truth is that all the water has pee in it.
Every glass of tap water in LA contains a few molecules of water that have, relatively recently, passed through my bladder.
The only people that don't have someone 'upriver', drink cattle urine instead.
One exception, well water, usually nasty tasting. Plus the joys of insufficient septic system setback.
John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'
David Shaff obviously has a thing for watersports. It takes a Republican level of personal denial to drain 38 million gallons just to avoid drinking a little bit of pee.
im willing to bet the bottom of that thing has a nice big layer of bird poop at the very least.
Ignorant voters will fire anyone who is a member of the water board/district if it discovered they allowed piss to enter their facets.
Unlike the corrupt state and federal governments the local ones actually listen to their constituents.
http://saveie6.com/
Hire a top-class guard person to that area immediately. If you really can pee into the water supply, you could easily poison it too.
...all the time. It's all psychology, it's human urine - therefor it is oh so terrible. Think of all the bird-droppings, huge flocks of birds flying by...doing their thing. They carry far more diseases with them than we dare to even think of, never-mind mention in the news. But human urine? Yuck ;)
What this world is coming to - is for you and me to decide.
Fish crap in their drink along with frogs, birds and who knows what else. They have water treatment plants to make it drinkable, how the fuck do these morons get into such high positions?
The most important line in the article is the very last:
$35k is nothing when compared to even the lawyer fees of a single potential frivolous lawsuit over this. All it would take is one kid getting sick (likely for completely unrelated reasons). And then they'd have to start publicly defending the decision to not clean it. I'm not saying the cleaning is the practical choice. Just that the absurdity of the U.S. legal system makes it fiscally irresponsible for the city to do anything else.
What's that in something understandable? Like how many Olympic size swimming pools or Pacific Oceans?
Budweiser sent trucks to take some of the piss water away to make American style beer
I suspect the ambient daily bird and other critter droppings in the reservoir per day exceed what these stupid kids did. 38M gallons will dliute it all safely. only idiot public officials would worry about a miscule harm.
Back in the "old days" (medieval), Beer was preserved by adding Lant, to give Lanted Ale.
Lant is stale urine, and it acted as a marvelous preservative. So, adding urine in this fashion to that volume won't be a problem. It's just one of perception..
Discussed to death on Bruce Schneier's blog. Long story short: The draining is part of a political fight between two groups who want to control and monetize the water supply. All in a city of nuts who, in this day and age, drink untreated water direct from uncovered reservoirs and streams. A lot of things to worry and wonder about there...
Do you realize that in addition to urinating in water, why, there are studies underway to urinate in salt, flour, fruit juices, soup, sugar, milk... ice cream. Ice cream, Mandrake, children's ice cream.
PlusFive Slashdot reader for Android. Can post comments.
Using real units of measure?
Here i sit
In awe and wonder
Would chaff drain a lake
For a bit of chunder
For the amount
The kid did pee
Is in the reals of
Homeopathy
But doesn't chaff know
Fish and birds
Will fill the lake
With piss and turds
If you gave me a choice between a printer and a giraffe with explosive diarrhoea, i'll get my ladder and my raincoat
American beer?
Its Fucking close to water anyways.
of a homeopath, and the dilution only makes his pee taste stronger.
I live in Portland. They'd probably allow it if he was a free-range drunkard with organic piss.
For linux tips: http://www.linuxtipsblog.com
This is not the first time that Portland has emptied a reservoir. This is the only time that it has made national news. One of the times that they drained the reservoir was for when somebody was attempting to pee in it and it was unclear if the intoxicated individual had actually urinated into the reservoir.
The reservoirs in Portland are a bit of a contentious subject. We Portlanders greatly appreciate our open air reservoirs however the City Water Bureau does not. Despite a large public outcry to keep our open air reservoirs our water department despite saying that they were working to keep our reservoirs, did not file for a waiver from the department of homeland security to keep the reservoirs open air. While most Portlanders recognize the importance of controlling access to our water supply we wish that the water department listened to public comment more and acted less like a dictator.
...fish fuck in it.
Left MS Windows for Linux Mint and never looked back!
Vote for Bernie in 2016!
no one in PDX cares one way or the other... seriously the only ones that seem too dont even live there.
If those parents had left well enough alone and never taught the kid not to pee in his pants the kid never would have done this. If it was a young girl I wouldn't bother to dump the water.
It's an open reservoir. Birds use it. That is true of the vast majority of terrestrial water supplies, at some point in their use cycle. (Water in Fairfax County, Virginia, for example, comes from the Occoquan River.) What more do you need to say?
The city knew full well that there was no problem with the water, but too many of its citizens would have created an uproar. Yes, they're uniformed, but the city just didn't want get bogged down with morons who would never ever understand.
I live in Oregon and this kind of thing happens in the Bull Run watershed quite regularly. Water is dumped, not for any "public safety's sake", but to cause thousands of dollars in "damages" to the city of Portland in order to justify raising the level of the crime from a misdemeanor to a felony.
This is a classic example of governments and problems. When some sort of problem is identified, and "the people" want action to happen, the government has two choices to deal with the problem.
One, they can take appropriate action, if they can do that and know what to do and how to do it. Even better if doing so is relatively cheap. In this case, you do the cheap thing to make it go away.
Two, they can do everything in their power to suppress knowledge of the problem. A problem nobody knows about is one that doesn't need to be solved. This is especially important if the problem is big or serious, or affects a lot of people in a negative way, and to which the government has no solution. The only thing worse than a big problem is having "the people" aware of it and that their government is unable to act. So is is essential that the government take this route when they cannot solve the problem or don't know how, or can't afford the solution. Or there's some other reason they don't want to solve it but they can't admit that either.
So type one problems, you dump the reservoir. It's cheap to clean it out and, well, water is cheap anyway.
A good example of type two problems are the side effects from the chemical disposal mishandling at Groom Lake. To admit the problem exists would invite a huge liability mess. So by denying it, they avoid the problem. Because they can.
It has been speculated one reason the governments generally dodge the UFO issue is that if they were ever identified as a real force(s) of some kind, then the people would demand that something be done about stopping it. It's not clear anyone would have the ability to DO anything about it and when your government can't protect you, what good is the government? So a problem like this would have to be denied.
Thankfully there are no UFOs. So this is not a problem.
Sig for hire.
They love waste.
Well there you have it. One man's costs are another man's revenue, after all, so don't explain with stupidity what you can explain with the sheriff boning the wife of the CEO of the company that cleans the reservoir. It's the least he can do to ease his guilt.
Maybe the TSA program of confiscating bottles of water on planes was smart after all.
Please continue to piss away your drinking water. It's not like it will be more valuable than gold come the end of the 21st century as you pollute more and more.
According to the City of Portland's Website (http://www.portlandoregon.gov/Water/article/328963), the total capacity of the Portland reservoir system is about 220 million gallons, with "distribution storage reservoirs" ranging in size from 1000 to 10 million gallons. How much urine did this kid evacuate into the reservoir? According to the National Institutes of Health (cites in Livescience- http://www.livescience.com/323...), the average healthy human bladder can hold "nearly 2 cups of urine comfortably."
Let's err on the side of caution on both sides- assume that this kid both had an insanely huge bladder capable of holding 2-1/2 cups of urine *and* that he peed into a 1000 gallon distribution storage reservoir- the worst-case scenario, in other words. 2-1/2 cups of urine is 20 ounces, which is equal to 0.156 gallons (128 oz/1 gal). 0.156 gallons/1000 gallons = 0.00015625- 0.00156% pee in the reservoir. And this is *before* the processing that happens to all water *after* it exits the reservoir and before it enters the city's pipes.
The reason this is absurd is the same reason that fear of poisoning a city's water supply via open reservoirs is stupid: you'd both need so bloody much of whatever it is to have a significant amount *and* that something would have to survive various filtration, purification, etc. processes after that.
No, scratch that... draining a reservoir b/c a kid peed into it isn't absurd, it's mind-blowingly stupid and a horrid waste of taxpayer money. Any lawyer who couldn't defend against a lawsuit the way I did above deserves to not only be disbarred, but to also have his college + HS diplomas revoked.
-Z
You can't sue the government unless you have its permission. Unless there is a law that permits you to raise doubt about the city's water quality in court, that's a non-issue.
Lol... they're closing the resivour next year anyway:
"Those natural contaminants are a key part of the Environmental Protection Agency's justification for a rule that requires all open-air reservoirs to be covered. Portland is scheduled to disconnect the open-air reservoirs on Mt. Tabor from the drinking water system by the end of 2015.
Shaff said there isn't much the bureau can do about those natural contaminants in the meantime, and that they don't pose a serious health risk."
http://www.oregonlive.com/port...
So this is actually twice as stupid as it sounds.
I have a solution this this repeated problem. They should run an electric mesh fence around the edge of the reservoir. When idiots decide to take a leak they will be in for a serious shock. If expense is an issue they can set up cameras and live stream then next idiot. The ad revenue of the video going viral should cover the costs.
-rd
My city's water supply comes from Shoal Lake, via a near 100 year old aqueduct. There are local reservoirs to store some in case of disruption.
http://www.ryerson.ca/~amacken...
Of course the native bands that live there are not really happy about the whole thing.....
http://www.winnipegfreepress.c...
I rather expect a lot of them piss in the water quite purposely every day, and people here know it.
It is an act of symbolism, but it does not stop normal people from drinking the water.
Fish shit in it.
And birds, deer,bigfoot, bear, racoons. And since our city reservoir is a lake surrounded by residences, I'm sure numerous kids swimming the city park just don't bother getting out to take a whiz.
Have gnu, will travel.
Does the Portland city water supply reservoir has special aqua johns for all the fishes and frogs and all sorts of things that live there? And where do *they* go?
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
Lighthhouses and Casco Bay. Oh wait, wrong Portland.
Seriously? no water purifier at home? What's wrong with Americans these days?
Our first purifier came from some USA brand and that's how we learned the correct way to drink.
It is not about science and logic but the ick factor and feelings. If they did not dump it someone would sue once they found out for the supposed danger even if there was none.
150mL urine in 150 million liters?
1/10^9; that's a 9X potentiation! Holy shit, that piss would have been potent!
What is the qualification of the person that took that decision. I suspect once again we hit the problem of pure manager in charge of technical decisions.
Who's well water have you been tasting? Well water in many areas is among the best tasting water, hands down. Zero processing. A natural balance of minerals. No chlorine or fluoride. How can you go wrong with that?
And it's you, thank you & the guys at ars.tech.
Also the comments from "David Shaff" a.k.a. "The Drain Man" are contradictory to the extreme
"we fish out nature transgressions(dead brids, leafs ..)"
and
"do you want to drink someone's pee"
"Do you want to drink the rot fluids of a dead bird" - yes because if we would clean the pool to often.
Ahhhh!!!!!!!!!!!!!
Salem witch trail style reasoning.
...great for yogis and ok for you.
Yes it's silly to dump all that water just because of a tiny bit of pee but it's also silly for people to say "Oh, but LA is sooo thirsty."
Water is a local resource. It can't just be piped down to LA. And for the people of Portland it's not that much water. When I lived there one thing I never needed to worry about was saving water. It rains a lot there. 38M gallons is about 20 seconds flow of the Columbia river. My water bill was so low as to be negligible; I literally never had to think about it. That may be hard for people in drier parts of the country to grasp but there's no reason to Portland should feel bad. For all we know that reservoir was due for a cleaning anyway.
The Portland city water supply is continually tested, and those tests have repeatedly shown the water to be of higher quality (in terms of dissolved solids/minerals and contaminants) than most of the city/municipal water supplies in the United States -- despite the lack of treatment and open reservoirs. There's a 12,000 foot tall mountain with some of the cleanest natural springs in the world flowing directly in to the city water supply; a bottle of Perrier or San Pellegrino is probably dirtier.
This whole thing is astroturf anyway; someone wants to take away the city's ability to set water rates.
Would the boy that peed into the water supply be considered as domestic terrorist? If Reid think that Bundy supporters are domestic terrorists, than what should this boy be considered as?
But every bit of water we've got has been dinosaur piss and shit at some point.
You insensitive clod!
With that in mind, would you bet against his ability to manoeuver for a jury that will be swayed by rethoric about the ickiness of drinking pee?
I'm afraid the grandparent post has nailed it: it's cheaper to waste a few million gallons of perfectly good drinking water than to risk a lawsuit.
People pee in the water supply EVERY secondofevery minute of everyday !..
Also the probability thata molecule of water that was inside adolf hitler is in each glass of water you drinkis actually very high. circa 90%.
So you're not just drinking pee, you're drinking hitler's pee. And also showering in hitler's pee.
The people who took this decision should be exiled to Somalia. Fuck them. Seriously.
It is full of native Democrat voters.
The government would gorge itself on military contracts, studies, and all manner of contracts. They would build entire schools to study the critters even if they didn't have a single cell to study.
UFOs are the perfect enemy: They never attack (except when a little more fear is necessary) , your average human is terrified of them. Hunting rifles won't work against flying saucers. We would be totally dependent on the government to protect us from the grey devils.
I can feel my taxes going up just thinking about it.
In the early days (colonial and uses-of-urine-442390/?no-istbefore) it was common for people to brush their teeth with urine, because it helped whiten the teeth and the ammonia can kill some of the bacteria that caused gum disease.
Historic uses for urine
http://www.smithsonianmag.com/...
I'm banking on Fred and Carrie writing this into "Portlandia" somehow.
Good Lord what a gift from the people of Portalnd to comedy fans everywhere!
We play the game with the bravery of being out of range
Undoubtably this mad pisser was held accountable for his actions, and either went 2 jail or paid some fines to the societal overlords. How about holding the overlords responsible for throwing away all this water. Maybe we could drown them. As a friend of fish I am pissed off that these tyrants can get away with this deed. I lost several good friends who happened to be living in all this water at the time. Now they are all gone. Devestation on a massive scale like 10 million voices screaming out in the night. We will not go quitely, and the more the portland overlords tighten their grip the more we will slip through. No rest until the overlords of portland have paid the price just like my friends did.
It really is BS what has happened, as the water in the reservoir is going through a filtering system before it actually hits the pipes, at least that's something I hope it is, otherwise there are much MUCH worse things to worry about.. Hell one dead animal in the reservoir is much MUCH worse than even a football team pissing in the reservoir.. IMHO they should fire the person who decided to drain the reservoir..
Don't worry folks, the dose was at approved homeopathic dilution.
I know the water is fine, but if I lived in Portland and they hadn't emptied the reservoir I would have been looking at the tap water a little more suspiciously, and if I was someone who sometimes bought bottled water I probably would have been a little more likely to buy some. I have no doubt many of you are the same.
Someone peeing in the tap water is icky, it doesn't matter if it's irrational, we are irrational, and as costs of irrationality goes emptying a single reservoir is pretty damn cheap. There's times to stand on scientific principal, this isn't one of them. There's no point in grossing out an entire city, reducing confidence in the municipal water supply, and impacting human health and the environment by pushing people towards bottled drinks, just because it's irrational. Sometimes the most rational thing you can do is accommodate your irrationality.
I stole this Sig
It's a cover up. Portland is selling the water to a Fracking company or a Bottled Water company and just needs an excuse to explain why 38 Million gallons has gone missing. Water is gold these days. Quite brilliant really!