Going down the drain

Pristine water may work in Oregon, but here we are quite at home with the murky and the muddy

Far away from the dust and bustle of our tropical existence are pristine paradises like Portland, Oregon. Life there is lived differently: the climate is salubrious, the environs immaculate. Cleanliness is a serious matter, so if you are a young man inebriated enough to mistake the city’s drinking water reservoir as a sewage treatment plant to pee into it, rest assured that your piss-adventure would be duly recorded on a security camera.

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If you are a Portland resident, you can skip the trepidation while turning the tap on in the morning, as your civic authorities have already drained out the 8 million gallons of urine-tainted lake water, restoring you to the state before the big leak, sorry, lapse.

Not that this particular episode involving the making of water, and its unmaking, came cheap. The worth of the water flushed out, including the cleaning charges, was estimated to be a neat $28,000. Of course, one can always count on the sceptics and green geeks to cry foul, even when the authorities made it known that they were merely trying to address the ‘yuck’ factor that was bound to crop up. The damp squibs, however, would have none of it and kept insisting that any water body would contain excrement and carcasses of marine and amphibian creatures, and that such wastage of freshwater was a criminal act.