Trendy environmentalism means stepping in ‘rivers of urine’

Heartland friend Steve Hayward over at Powerline hips us to a story about a Boca Raton, Florida high school that has not had a clean experience upon making their building “green.”

The dirty details:

Students at a high school in Boca Raton, Florida, must step over rivers of urine and endure the stench of rancid waste after a plan to bring ‘green’ waterless urinals into bathrooms backfired.

School officials at Spanish River High School thought they had found an environmentally-friendly, cost-saving solution for their bathrooms when they installed Falcon Waterfree urinals in their boys bathrooms.

But with no water moving through the school’s copper pipes to flush the urine into the sewer system, the waste produced noxious gases that ate through the metal, leaving leaky pipes that allowed urine to drip into walls and flow onto floors.

‘It was pretty disgusting,’ school board chairman Frank Barbieri told the South Florida Sun-Sentinel.

‘The girls had to step over a river of urine. I could smell it as soon as I walked into the hallway.’

Hell, I think waterless urinals smell bad when they are working right. I can only imagine how that high school smells. (Interesting that this story was apparently only reported by the British press … when it’s about an American high school. Read the rest of the London Daily Mail story here.)

Waterless urinals make sense — in certain situations. I used to live in Southern California, where water is plentiful at the tap, but can stress the sources from which it comes. In five years of living there, we were told constantly by the media that we were in “drought conditions.” One year, we had record snowpack, and a very heavy rainy season in SoCal. Still, the water scolds told us to preserve water. “The drought isn’t over yet,” they’d say.

Fine. I understand that Southern California is a desert — only made green and fertile by an enormous influx of water from elsewhere. But I was driving from Chicago to Pittsburgh a couple of months ago and stopped at a rest stop just a few miles from lake Michigan. And those bathrooms — in the brand new complex — had waterless urinals. Did I mention Lake Michigan and its 1,180 cubic miles (by volume) of water was just next door? But this nonsense is what you get when you combine public officials wanting to polish their “green” resume with “green” construction mandates from government — no matter the situation.

Is Florida starving for water to flush urinals? I think not. Will the government consider it a “green job” when plumbers go in and replace these stinky waterless urinals when they prove to be a great hazard to public health? Judging by the way the green scam is going, I’m betting “yes.”