10 Of The Most Horrifying & Amusing Portable Toilet Stories

With all Hallows eve just around the corner, we thought create a Roundup of the craziest and most horrifying things to ever happen, or be found within or around, portable toilets.

Read on, if you dare, and do have a very happy but spooky Halloween!

A Day In The Life Of A Portable Toilet Sanitation Worker

Home to strange things and unexpected hazards, portable toilets are not exactly known for their allure. Those who clean them are absolutely brilliant at developing a positive attitude, but there are times, as evidenced in the following blog, how that could end up being quite challenging.

On a typical day, a portable toilet sanitation worker will service 40 to 50 different units, although the word, ‘ service’ doesn’t really come close to covering the task at hand. Alas, for it all translates into shoving the end of a vacuum pipe down into a hole and sucking up the contents. This is usually done with the aid of our lab and field tested odor control pumper truck exhaust deodorant, and if it’s not, the situation can be often be horrifyingly odorous!

The special vacuum is attached to a tanker truck that is equipped with a large waste storage unit and a smaller freshwater tank. Once the contents are removed, the sanitation worker fills the tank with a few buckets of freshwater and then adds the required squirts of blue goo or a pre-measured packet of a dry solution.

Despite this scenario, cleaning out the holding tank is often the least challenging aspect of a sanitation worker’s job. This is due to the fact that people can be filthy, and when it comes to depositing waste where none should ever  be found, very creative as well. Even the ceiling of a portable toilet can be laden with fecal debris, albeit how it got there could prove to be an interesting topic, nowhere near or after meal times. 

By far the worst nightmare any PT operator faces is when a porta-potty tips over, either by a natural accident (storms, etc) or at the hand of pranksters (idiots of all types, etc) who think its funny. They wouldn’t laugh if they had to deal with the consequences, which involve lifting up the unit as a tsunami of waste pours out all over the place including the poor sanitation worker.

The Source sanitation worker must then step inside this disgusting space and thoroughly clean it. And still, the horror continues  as the vacuum tankers make their smelly way to municipal wastewater treatment plants, where it is added to the rest of the sewage sludge. Each porta-potty unit is serviced on a weekly basis, or more often in high-traffic areas. So next time you see one of these trucks on the road, at least salute the driver, if for no other reason that that there by the grace of God, so go you.

But these forgotten professionals often report some light at the end of their waste filled tunnels in the form of strange occurrences and even stranger things users have inadvertently left behind (No pun intended.) All kinds of things are dropped into the tanks where their job is to clog the vacuum, which they do very well. 

One porta-potty worker who wished to remain honest and smelly but anonymously wrote about finding cell phones, eye-glasses, all kinds of drug paraphernalia, guns, knives, wallets full of cash (as well as you now what) and expensive pieces of jewelry floating in the blue poop swamp of putrid forgotten things. He admitted to somehow cleaning the money and finding away to take it and consider it a bonus or fringe benefit to is thankless, endless and throughly nauseating, disgusting job. 

5 Of The Strangest Happenings In Portable Toilets

The following are all true stories from across the globe featuring some of the mishaps we humans experience when we dare to venture inside a portable toilet.

1) The Man Who Got Caught While Trying To Retrieve A Phone 

The Drammen Region fire brigade in Norway had to recently rescue a man who got caught in a portable toilet while trying to retrieve a friend’s cellphone. Twenty-year old Berntsen Larsen, an amateur diver, told the Norwegian press that he didn’t think twice about leaping into action when his friend dropped a cellphone into the toilet and called out for help. But he soon became trapped within the toilet, as he was slim enough to fit inside, but apparently could not come back the same way.

Firefighters had to use a saw to cut the young man free from his revolting dilemma. The poor man was taken to a hospital for injuries sustained to his upper arms and given preventative antibiotics due to the waste he was exposed to while inside the commode. Although he did not say so, it is likely that Mr. Larsen learned a lesson  either about playing hero or doing so inside a porta-potty.

2) English Woman In Porta-Potty Teleported Across A Festival

According to the BBC, a woman was “teleported” across a festival site in a portable toilet when it was accidentally moved by a forklift truck to the other side of the harbor. The woman, who remains anonymous, was using the portable toilet before the opening of Newlyn Fish Festival in Cornwall, England. The woman was not injured, but according to Harbormaster, Rob Parsons, was suffering from a bit of shock. That seems reasonable, as after all, it isn’t every day one gets a free ride anywhere.

3) Colorado Man Hides In Porta-Potty At Yoga Festival

In 2011, a 31-year-old man named Luke Chrisco was found hiding in the tank of a porta-potty in Boulder Colorado. A young woman attending the yoga festival was using the portable toilet when she noticed something moving in the tank. She watched in horror as a feces-stained man emerged from the sickening depths and ran away. He pleaded guilty to attempted unlawful sexual contact and two burglary counts, and was sentenced to three years in prison and 10 years of probation. 

Police believe that he also hid in other portable toilets around the city of Boulder  where he would watch women use the toilet. While some may say, to each his own and whatever floats one boat, this criminal predilection is beyond the pale and perhaps suggestive of another genre of criminal with a new moniker; namely, a Pooping Tom. 

4) Guests Discover Secret Party Inside A Portable Toilet

Guests at the Sziget Music Festival in Budapest, Hungary, discovered a secret rave (party) taking place inside one of the event’s portable toilets. Festivities were hidden behind a secret passageway in a seemingly innocuous portable toilet, which served as a smelly portal to a new and different celebration. According to Fabian Ruivenkamp, who attended the festival: “Just open a random toilet and there is a party going on. 

It was a secret kept by the festival staff but I heard about it from other revelers.” One can only wonder what party hosts serve to their guests at such celebrations? Would the menu include: appetizers that move and have minds of their own; strange looking dips for what once perhaps cheese and crackers and/or perhaps poopsicles for dessert?

5) Moscow Pedestrians Flee Runaway Portable Toilets In Windstorm

In June of 2017, the residents of Moscow were running for cover against the powerful winds that were sweeping portable toilets across the streets and sidewalks of Red Square. Video footage captures a frantic scramble for cover as portable toilets became trajectories that whizzed by the Moscow Museum of Archaeology and the Museum of the 1812 War with Napoleon. According to Twitter user EugeneDX14: “Even the toilets are fleeing from the murderous regime.”

5 Of The Strangest Things Found In Portable Toilets

Sometimes sanitation workers in the course of their daily operations discover  surprising items that are not so easily dropped in portable toilets. These include: sweaters, socks, panties, sex toys and bucket loads of condoms, indicating that the cheapest motels in town not only provide rooms with a bathroom but actually are a bathroom! The following items have been found in portable toilets throughout the country and some of them may really surprise you.

1) Australian Janitor Finds $93,000 in Portable Toilet

Its looks like honesty really is the best policy, or a least it was for Chamindu Amarsinghe , an Australian janitor who in 2011, discovered $93,000 in the trash bins and flushed down the pipes of a portable toilet. He contacted the police and when authorities failed to explain the money’s origins, a fair-minded judge ruled that the janitor could keep $76,000 while awarding the rest to the state.

2) A Live Bomb From World War II

In Stockport, England, the police recently got a call to investigate a strange device discovered in an outdoor portable toilet. To their surprise, it was a live bomb from the last world war. They evacuated the area and called in the bomb squad who carefully removed the device and set it off safely in a nearby park. 

3) Lost Mail Discovered In Porta Potty

In December of 2016, residents of Macomb Township, Michigan began complaining of mail delivery problems. Literally, hundreds of people had not received expected checks, holiday cards, store coupons, and other items. A construction worker unexpectedly discovered the missing mail inside a porta-potty. It was estimated that the hundreds of pieces of mail had been inside the toilet for about a month.

The recovered correspondence was blue due to the odor reducing dye added to the toilet. Some of the smelly lot was sanitized before being returned while others had to be reissued. 

The culprit was a USPS letter career who has since resigned and is facing criminal felony charges of mail theft. While all are wondering how and why this could have happened, rumors abound that this unnamed courier had obviously lost faith in mailboxes and believed the portable toilet to be a much safer repository for peoples’ checks and correspondence!

4) A Newly-Born Baby

In  the summer of 2009, in Long Wharf Park in Cambridge, Maryland, a 44-year-old woman gave birth to a baby inside a porta-potty. Candy Vigneri dropped the baby inside the waste tank, casually asked a construction worker for a cigarette and smoked it at neatly picnic table. When a man approached to use the toilet, she warned him: “Don’t go inside. I just had a baby in there.” 

The man called 911 and when EMT personnel arrived, the baby was covered in blue dye and unresponsive. Vigneri was arrested and charged with child abuse and reckless endangerment. The baby survived and was assigned to the custody of the county’s social services.

5) A Mysterious Suspicious Package

On the morning of June 15, 2016, a sanitation worker cleaning a porta-potty along the Canalside waterfront in Buffalo, New York, found a suspicious package containing an unknown liquid. The Erie County Sheriff’s bomb squad responded to the scene, closed the park to the public for the day and used a robot to remove the package. Although it was determined that the parcel did not contain explosives, the  nature of the liquid content could not be identified. It remains a mystery to this day as to who placed the package there, and why as well as the identity of the liquid found inside. 

Surco Portable Sanitation Products Origins and Development

We have been a world leader in odor control solutions since 1946, developing and producing sophisticated strategies for every application under the sun that far outshine potable sanitation industry standards. Our odor control products and systems are the industry’s best, especially designed to suit the needs of their many clients by capturing the essence and power of natural products. All of our manufactured goods are created and manufactured in their ultra modern, 85,000 square-foot Pittsburgh facility.

The Surco Technology Center

Dedicated to the exploration of scientific odor control solutions, our Surco Technology Center is comprised of a team of experts equipped with the latest in gas chromatography, mass spectrometry, head space analysis, distillation, extraction and quality control technology. This is the potent scientific force behind the creation of state-of-the-art sanitation odor control products, deodorants, liquids, dry toss packets and wash down solutions. When it comes to important questions relating to the portable sanitation industry, our teams have decades of experience.

If you’re portable toilet company looking for the very best and most effective odor control products in the marketplace, look no further. Call our team today!

Oh, and Happy Halloween!