Last week a teenager jumped the fence encircling a city reservoir in Portland, Oregon. CCTV caught the young man in the act of urination and the police arrested the perpetrator and his two friends for trespassing. The city water administrator decided that the city residents didn’t want their water tainted with urine and emptied the reservoir’s 38 million gallons, despite admitting that the health risk was small.
USA Today’s headline ran the banner ‘Man urinates in reservoir, ruins 38M gallons of water’.
People quickly calculated that the urine amounted to about 1/8 gallon in a reservoir of 38 million gallons amounts to a concentration of 3 parts per billion according to www.slate.com
Drink was most definitely part of this story and beer was probably the cause of his having to take a whizz.
As for the hysterical response by the water administrator and accusations of waste by the public we don’t know if the young man had been eating asparagus, which as Babe Ruth once said, “I don’t eat asparagus. It make my pee smell.”
Actually that’s the only Babe Ruth quote I know and it is very true.
