Comments

1
This is insane.

I'm sure no animal or bird has ever managed to sneak a little waste into the reservoir.
2
Don't tell them what ducks and fish do in the water.
3
This is the same town that voted against fluoridating their drinking water, so I'm not surprised they're overly touchy about it.
4
full bladder ~ 500ml = 0.5L
Reservoir = 105991529.95L
Human impurity in reservoir = 0.0000004717%

You get more shit and piss into your system touching door knobs, and later your nose, mouth.
5
#1 and #2 beat me to it. I guess animal piss and feces is ok cause its so natural? But a larger point is how unacceptable it is to drink water that contains un-measurably small amounts of human pee (its the thought that counts!) yet its ok to breath air that has known carcinogens in it from industrial pollution, vehicle exhaust, coal train dust... etc. Never mind the toxins that settle into drinking water from air pollution (not to mention the toxins from fracking...). To me there is a lesson and opportunity here - if people are that sensitive about pee in drinking water, perhaps they'd be less acceptable than they are now of actual toxins they're ingesting from pollution if they were made more aware of it.
6
I live in Portland, I voted in favor of fluoridating the water, and I think this is an overreaction but understandable. On the news someone will scream "THEY ARE SENDING RAW SEWAGE INTO OUR PIPES!!!" and people will freak out at the prospect that 1/16 of a gallon of urine was mixed into 38 million gallons of water prompting calls for the Portland Water Bureau's heads to be mounted on pikes outside of the Portland building.
7
If he managed to "contaminate" the reservoir from that distance, give him a reward and ask him how deep the water was.
8
Remember, these are largely believers in homeopathy. (((pee memory)))
9
Don't tell the residents of Portland that animals shit, piss, and die in that water.

Meanwhile, touching a keyboard, mouse, or phone and then eating a sandwich/donut gives you a larger and nastier load of microbes than drinking pure piss.

People are funny. Especially people from Portland.
10
Hahahaha. One of the things I have learned reading Savage Love for many many years is that you can drink urine directly from the source! And it's harmless (unless you drink gallons and gallons of it, which can give you kidney stones, but I digress). So I am not the least bothered by this stunt.

But 20 years ago, without that knowledge, seeing this video would have probably freaked me right out, and I would have been one of the people calling to have the reservoir drained and scrubbed.

Thanks, Savage Love!
11
flagrant waste.

however, I am in favor of publically shaming this jackhole. he's a big boy, put him in stocks in pioneer courthouse square for a couple days.
12
Let's not forget that any water supply as far down stream as Portland already has pee in it.
13
This is the SECOND TIME Portland has done this in three years! http://theweek.com/article/index/260122/…
14
Just like your backyard swimming pool, or even Olympic swiming pools, they shoulve just chlorinated it all.

The magic polite fiction of chlorination is what lets kids spit pool water at their friends without considering how it was flushing across one anothers' rectums a few moments before.

Cause chlorinized=sanitized.
15
Wicked Pissah!
16
@8, you beat me to it. Them's homeopathic concentrations. The water can remember when it had pee in it!

I dunno, though; it's Portland. Maybe they're worried about what the kid might have had in his bladder besides pee. They're all wasted on Dilaudid and PCP down there, aren't they?
17
No doubt this will soon inspire a new Portlandia sketch
18
@13 - We even covered this in Slog, homeopathy jokes and all!

Come on, Portland, give us something new to make fun of.
19
If Portland has so much free water that they can afford to flush 38 million gallons, they should send those 38 mil gals to California (for a fee, of course).

Californians practically invented pee-drinking. They won't have any problem at all with a trace of "eau de cute young skateboarder" in their cocktail's ice cubes.
20
@19: Yes, think of the lime crops that could have watered.
21
Up next: someone sneezes, Portland officials scratch their heads at how to evacuate all of the air from the building.
22
@20 - You do know that California's right on the edge of share the shower/if it's yellow let it mellow, don't you? And that the reason the lime crop is being decimated is disease, not drought?
23
@22: I thought it was the drought that was hitting limes the hardest, thanks.
24
#23 - You're welcome. It's actually called "citrus greening disease" because the fruit never develops beyond the hard, green, unripe state, and the trees die in four to five years. It's ruined crops in Central America, Mexico, and Florida, and the citrus psyllid (insect that spreads it) has been tracked in California's groves. Quite serious for all citrus fruits, not just limes.
25
You've all missed the real reason. That kid brushed with fluoride toothpaste - that's the contamination risk.
26
We see it here in Seattle also. Not long ago I was at the West Seattle PCC, and the woman in front of me was buying mass amounts of drinking water because our water is apparently so terrible. If what happened in Portland happened here (and it has, especially back in the old days at Cal Anderson and Volunteer Park), she'd probably start bathing in bottled water.

Having grown up on the Missouri River, where our water was the waste water from Sioux City, etc, I can't get too riled up about it.
27
@13 beat me to it. I remember the last time they did this, and thinking it was (a) fucking insane and (b) they needed to cover those reservoirs if they were going to be fucking insane about it. De ja fucking vu.
28
If it's good enough for astronauts...
29
@26: I beg to differ dear, you need a filter or bottled water in Seattle. Brew some coffee with tap, and some with bottled and do a taste test. It's not subtle at all.
30
I can't believe I have to tell people this AGAIN, but here goes: if you live south of the ship canal, you get your water from the Cedar River watershed, which is the best-tasting water anywhere except maybe New York City's. If you live north of the ship canal (Phoebe) you get your water from the Tolt River, and it's not very good. If your water is really bad in either place, it's because of your pipes.

Most bottled water IS tap water, regardless of what it says on the label (tap water comes from springs too).
31
@30: Yes, I live north of the ship canal. But bottled water is still distilled/filtered, and thus better for some locations.
But I boil pasta and make rice with tap.
32
Phoebe, calm yourself. You're hysterical, dear. Our water, on both sides of the ship canal, is perfectly fine. If you want to be suckered into using a filter, that is your choice, of course. But just remember - whatever you do, you're gonna die.
33
@31, bottled water is never distilled, unless it says "distilled" in big letters on the front. And distilled water isn't really good to drink -- it's used for things like steam irons and other uses where the dissolved minerals in water create deposits that can gunk up the works. It's preferred for use in making solutions, like for my record-cleaning machine, but not for human consumption.

The "filtering" that goes into bottled water is rarely anything more involved than printing the word on the label. There isn't anything to filter out, for the most part. Really, tap water is excellent stuff; it just has an odd taste from the Tolt because of the red-cedar tree cover it filters through.
34
@4 Don't forget about coins, cash and cell phones.
35
@33 Actually, bottled water has the most effective filtration ever invented: it removes money from suckers.
36
Debate the science and economics till the cows come home, the fact remains that some tap water takes bad, or harder, than filtered or bottled water. You can't win an argument if the topic involves taste.

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