Drought? What Drought? Portland Is Throwing Out 38 Million Gallons of Water
Mount Tabor Reservoir No. 5 in Portland, Ore., will be drained after security cameras captured a local teenager urinating into the water. (Photo: Eeaumi/Wikimedia Commons)
Although Portland, Ore., has a notoriously rainy reputation, 2013 was the fifth-driest year ever for the city, and 2014 isn’t shaping up to be much wetter. But even a drought crisis isn’t stopping city officials from draining 38 million gallons of water from a local reservoir—all because a teenager urinated in it.
On Wednesday morning, surveillance cameras caught a 19-year-old male urinating in Mount Tabor Reservoir No. 5, which holds treated water that’s part of the city’s drinking supply. Even though urine is a waste product, it’s sterile and unlikely to pose a health threat. But Water Bureau Administrator David Shaff thinks Portland residents can’t handle the gross-out factor, so the open reservoir’s water has to go.
"There is at least a perceived difference from my perspective," Shaff told Oregon Live. "I could be wrong on that, but the reality is our customers don't anticipate drinking water that's been contaminated by some yahoo who decided to pee into a reservoir."
What are the chances of downing some of that teen’s urine? A healthy bladder can hold up to 16 ounces of it, which makes the amount whizzed into the reservoir a drop in a 38 million gallon bucket.
It’s well known that animals use the reservoir as a toilet, but this incident has led the bureau to test the water. Though it anticipates the tests will say the water isn’t a health risk, it is flushing the reservoir anyway.
To Shaff, it’s better to be safe than sorry. Besides, he said, "it's easy to replace those 38 million gallons of water.” That’s a statement that’s sure to make the heads of water conservation activists spin around like they’re that possessed kid in The Exorcist. Someone send Shaff some basic facts about the global water crisis, pronto.
The bureau’s decision is especially wasteful because the reservoir’s water was just dumped a month ago. The city already flushes the open-air reservoir twice a year to clean it. The water is discharged into the Columbia River, which is what will happen this time around too.
But thanks to the federal government, Portland’s finicky approach to a bit of urine in water will soon become a nonissue. In 2006, worries about what kinds of things terrorists could dump into the nation’s water supply led the Environmental Protection Agency to declare that all open-air reservoirs had to be covered or decommissioned. That means the Mount Tabor Reservoir’s days of being a magnet for teens with full bladders—and a lodestone of massive water waste—are numbered.