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Shitty situations - Mar 10, 2003 |
| forwarded by Diana K. I am forwarding some info from the pottie-list (yes, there is a pottie list) to remind us all that it is IMPERATIVE (ok, like really super important) that no garbage (no condoms, no tampons, and no baby wipes either) gets put in the potties. Also, dumping grey water in the potties is BAD! I have been guilty of this one myself in the past but I promise to never, ever do it again. Read on to find out why. Questions? please ask me. I know this is mostly not new information, but I was surprised to find trash was worse last year than in 2001. Diana ps. I have shortened the original message. ----- Original Message ----- From: "Roberta Morse" Subject: [pottie-list] My interview with JotS Greetings Poopers, Last night I had a lovely, lengthy conversation with Mike Enos, the Operations Manager of Johnny on the Spot. It was highly enlightening, frightening, and worthy of getting out to folks ASAP. It's worse than we thought, guys. I've said this before, and it MUST sink in: If we don't clean up our shit, BurningMan is off. Mike Enos isn't going to be the one to flush it either. He said he'll do whatever he has to to get his part of the job done. But there is only so much that he can do. No, honest, they are only human, and there is another force behind him that even he, the Shit King, is afraid of: Government. Truckee Meadows Waste Water Reclamation has given written notice that if they have to go through the 2000 Hazmat Hell again, they will not accept the shit that JotS trucks to them. See, they must visually inspect all the shit via screens. According to Mike, the screens almost never get actually clogged up to critical conditions where manual removal is necessary. Now, they do have a contingency plan on file that if the screens become critically clogged, they are to jump down into the pits wearing rubber suits and "hand trowel" or rake the trash off the screen. This is bad enough, but then they must provide the Health Dept a mountain of Hazmat paperwork. Nobody enjoys paperwork, and they like it even less than wading in shit wearing rubber suits -- an activity that is seen as "emergency" conditions, not routine. When they asked Mike last year what was the cause of this horror, he let two words escape that really set them off: Burning Man. Our shit stank bad in 2000. In 2001, Mike reports that it was 90% good. A little bit of debris, but amazingly clean. Mike then told me that the 2002 shit was 50% good, meaning we "pressed the limits." When this happends, the Health Dept takes notice. This is because the trucks aren't keeping up with demand due to clog delays, and we get the "6 inches above the rim" effect. So now it's the Health Dept too that can flush us. What JotS has done to attempt to accomodate, or "cover our asses" for us is to accumulate the shit (that's what the 20,000 gallon tank was out there for ) that is believed to be "trashy", and they pre-process it before taking it to Truckee Meadows. The only reason they had to do this was because they were afraid that if they took it straight to the vats, we'd get busted again, this time for good. The tank was originally meant as a fall back, an emergency measure -- they took on the trashy-shit only when they felt it was absolutely necessary. As it was, by event end, they accumulated 18,000 gallons of our waste. (so don't put your grey water down the commode either.) They can't keep working like this under emergency conditions. What will happen if that tank gets full? Nightmares are made of this. I asked him for an overall assessment on what's been done to improve the situation (are our efforts being noticed?) He said that both he and his employees are delighted by the efforts, attention and good intentions that we are doing. He reports that his employees do "freak out" when they see increased trash in the pots. Mike and his managers then act as "morale boosters" to get them back to work. It's a shitty job. We need to do better for them. Giving them a soda is nice. Telling your campmates to sport ziplock bags for icky debris is better. He also said that although 2002 stickers were good, the 2001 efforts were much better. He was under the impression that we weren't paying attention last year, like we had fewer staff or something, or were otherwise relaxing, and that we needed to go back to the 2001 level of effort in order to meet the crisis. He liked the megaphone use, the Gate/Greeter message, newpaper articles and radio spots, and said they need to continue. Excremental Correctness must be on everyone's lips again this year, just as it was in 2001. Every single one of us needs to take ownership of this problem. Excuses and denial aren't going to work this time. RobbiDobbs clear |