A High School Pumped Reclaimed Sewage Water into a Drinking Fountain for More Than a Year

One day in December of 2013, someone at St. Peter's College (which Americans would call a "private high school") in a suburb of Melbourne, Australia, started pumping reclaimed sewage water into a drinking fountain. No less than 16 months later, on April 1, a member of the custodial staff at the school noticed the switcheroo, and notified the authorities, according to theGuardian. For the one year and four months in between, the students attending St. Peter's were unwittingly drinking poop water.

South East Water, the local water authority, shut the flow of possibly-contaminated water off as soon as they received the report, and the town's health department has indicated that everyone's probably going to be fine. They've asked people to be on the lookout for an uptick in gastroenteritis cases though.

According to the WHO fact sheet on sanitation, contaminated water that might have come into contact with feces can do much worse than give you a case of the shits. "The human health effects caused by waterborne transmission vary in severity from mild gastroenteritis to severe and sometimes fatal diarrhea, dysentery, hepatitis and typhoid fever," the report says.

Related: "You Don't Know Shit"

But fortunately this wasn't just any poop water. It was Class A recycled water, a differentiation that sounds pedantic, but makes a big difference in terms of how many dookie molecules it contained. Recycled water in Australia is reclaimed rainwater, drain water, and sewage, filtered and prepared for unsupervised use by any person, as long as it's relegated to things like toilet tanks and landscaping. In other words, there were relatively few dookie molecules being squirted into the mouths of the students at St. Peter's.

You might remember a video of Bill Gates from earlier this year, in which he sips from a jar of crystal clear water that has been freshly squeezed from a batch of ripe turds. Gates was plugging a fabulous contraption he had just paid to have built called the Janicki Omniprocessor, but he was also making a really good point about the fact that most water on Earth has probably been poop at some point, and recycling wastewater is useful not just in places in the developing world that are experiencing famines, but also drought-stricken California, and even-more-drought-stricken Australia.

As we've noted here before, Australia is in the midst of a major drought, one that will potentially go on for infinity years. Recent indicators don't show any improvement in rainfall. Victoria, where this incident took place, lives under some pretty harsh restrictions on water use.

Now, when the Australian EPA says, "Reusing and recycling alternative water supplies is a key part of reducing the pressure on our water resources and the environment," they probably don't mean "shoot it into the mouths of children." Still, a group called Horticultural Australia Limited built a site to tout the glories of recycled sewage that includes a cringe-inducing YouTube video starring Jack Black, in which he struggles to sip that same kind of water that Bill Gates had no problem with.

With the right spin, this accidental experiment that used students as lab rats could be turned into great PR for the recycled water lobby. (Assuming, of course, that none of them come down with a slow-onset of fatal diarrhea in the next few days.) The slogan could be, "It was good enough to go down the gullets of a bunch of teenagers for over a year. Why not try watering your golf course with it?"

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