The city of Portland, Oregon, decided to empty a 7.8 million-gallon reservoir after a security camera caught a 21-year-old man peeing in it. Gross as it is, health concerns may not justify the $36,000 cost of draining it. A toxicology professor said that worse things happen in open-air reservoirs all the time, like animals defecating in them or dying and falling in. But the Portland Water Bureau’s administrator asked, “Do you want to drink pee?” The urinator said he thought the pool was a sewage-treatment plant.
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