Between topographically unfriendly locations, logistical nightmares and customers without a clue, every PRO can remember one particular Job from Hell. A resilient bunch, these operators consistently find creative ways to meet the challenge, as these PROs demonstrate.
Larry Page specializes in septic installation, pumping and portable restroom rental. Located not quite 10 miles southwest of Plymouth on Cape Cod, he fields a small inventory of 40 standard and four ADA units by Armal Inc. As might be expected, the majority of his portables contracts come from public events that lure tourists away from the beaches and lobster shacks.
“Every year we do the Cranberry Festival, hosted by Makepeace, the largest cranberry bog in our state. They rent 22 standard units and all of our handicapped restrooms.” The three-day event takes place over Columbus Day weekend each October in nearby Wareham. Page says being able to complete daily service is always a critical issue with this event.
“Those units are scattered over a good 50-acre parcel, and the festival ends around 5-6 at night. At that time of year, it’s already getting dark, so staying ahead of things before we lose the light is tough. By the time we maintain all of them, you can’t see very well. Or, if we decide to service them in the morning before the show starts, it’s still dark.”
His strategy for working through this challenge is sending a service crew of two. He’s chagrined at the extra cost. “You’re paying two guys to go out there, and one of them is just holding a flashlight while the other one does the pump-out. But you do what you’ve got to do to get the job done.”
The annual New York State Festival of Balloons at the municipal airport in Dansville is always a challenging event for O’Brien Septic. Hot air balloon exhibits and rides, an arts and crafts area, car show and international food court are all part of the five-day Labor Day weekend festival.
It’s a long day from 6 a.m. to 6 p.m. for show-goers, but service driver Sean O’Brien’s crew hustles to take as little of that time as possible to keep their restrooms shipshape for roughly 40,000 daily attendees. The show takes 40 standard restrooms and six ADA units, plus two hand-wash stations.
“Crowd control is our biggest challenge,” he says. “We put on extra staff for this event, about six people total. Some of them just block off a whole row of units to keep people away from them while they’re being serviced. We take an average of four minutes per unit. One guy’s pumping, one’s scrubbing, the next guy’s rinsing and filling hand sanitizers. It’s a system that keeps things moving, because people can get upset if you keep them out of the units for too long.”
This regimen takes place twice a day, once just after lunchtime, then again in late afternoon as everyone moves from the main area to the open fields for the end-of-day balloon launch. Of course, it would be easier if the units could be serviced before and after the show, but the nature of crowd flow through scheduled events makes that impossible.
“It would be nice to get out in front of the crowd,” O’Brien says, “but you need to get behind them, so that’s how we plan our service. We’re trying to provide the cleanest restroom possible, so you have to clean them in the middle of the day. Otherwise it would lead to a very unsanitary condition. You really have to schedule according to how the units are used, not what would be most convenient for you.”
Scenic Northport, Wash., sits along the banks of the Columbia River, just below the boundary with British Columbia, Canada. Just one town over, in Marcus, a harvest fair is held each year. Ciderfest celebrates nature’s bounty, specifically the crispy crop of apples the state is so famous for. Sweet Pee Portable Toilets provides sanitation for the popular festival, along with the greatest work challenges Mike and Lee Anne Lamb can recall.
Between 1,500-2,000 people are drawn to the one-day gathering featuring vendors, live music, a beer garden, food and a huge cider press. The challenge stems from festival organizers usually failing to order enough restrooms, so the ones that are placed routinely get over-used.
The worst part, according to Lee Anne, isn’t the over-use itself, but what gets put in the tanks besides what’s supposed to be there. “Beer cans … diapers are the worst,” she says.
Lamb reports that dealing with the mess is a straightforward, if distasteful, job. “You just fish them out,” before pumping. Then there’s the senseless vandalism. She says the most common thing they see is burn marks, even on brand-new units.
“People just don’t have respect,” says Mike Lamb. He agrees there’s not much to be done about it. “That’s part of the business,” he laments, but says they will continue to field new units to discourage such behavior. He also says Sweet Pee will insist next year on placing a sufficient quantity of units to serve the crowd.
They’ll be able to point to last year’s results to back up this requirement. He says he would be willing to turn down the job if the organizers won’t comply. “I’m not going to have my name on disgusting, dirty restrooms,” he says.
Farther north, about 75 miles southwest of Fairbanks, Alaska, Leroy Lausen and his wife, Vickie, provide portables for businesses around Denali National Park. Though located in the southern third of the state’s interior, the area can see temperatures as cold as -60 degrees F in winter, with January averages between -2 and -22 degrees.
Not surprisingly, their biggest challenge is keeping portable restrooms from freezing. There’s also the issue that any kind of plastic becomes extremely brittle and can shatter in such cold temperatures. Leroy Lausen has literally taken the matter into his own hands, by handcrafting his own portables.
“We have units specially built out of wood,” he explains. “They’re on skids with a portable tank inside. Then we put small ceramic electric heaters in the corners, and whoever rents the unit has to keep those plugged in. We don’t build the heaters into the walls, because it’s cheap and easy this way just to change them out when they burn out.”
It’s the portable sanitation equivalent of an automobile engine heater, which most folks have in this area.
