A recent viral video out of Romania shows a BMW parked on the side of side of the road with its engine bay engulfed in flames. The car’s owner had no choice but to stand there and watch it burn, until ... an unusual first responder pulled up on the scene with an altogether different kind of fire hose.
Yeah, this is going where you think it is. A pumper put the fire out by spraying sewage all over the driver’s BMW. Not all heroes wear capes, as they say. Check out the video below:
A septic truck rollover in Long Beach, Washington, recently slowed traffic for three hours and put out of commission the area’s only septic tank pumper.
Evergreen Septic Service says it’s unable to pump tanks until further notice since the crash damaged the truck’s tank.
No one was injured in the rollover, which only involved the driver of the septic truck. Owner Ben Woodby tells the Chinook Observer it wasn’t a great way to start his week, but he’s glad no one was hurt. “At the end of day, that’s just a chunk of metal.”
Update: Evergreen Septic Service is back to pumping.
In other news, the University of Alabama is launching a study that will give hundreds of children in the state’s Black Belt region another opportunity to test for hookworm. Similar tests were previously undertaken by the Baylor College of Medicine in 2017.
The suspected hookworm infections in Wilcox County likely stem from the fact that an estimated 60% of homes lack functional septic tanks and drain their untreated wastewater via straight-pipe into open-air pools, and children are being exposed to contaminated soil.
A United Nations poverty official in 2017 previously said of the Black Belt’s sewage problem that he’d never seen anything like it in a First World nation.
Now, to find out whether children are infected with hookworm or other related intestinal parasites, the researchers have hired local community health care workers to test children in the region.
“Our interest in this project stems from local concerns about health issues in children related to inadequate infrastructure in some of Alabama’s rural communities,” says Claudette Poole, a pediatrician who specializes in infectious diseases at the University of Alabama and is the study’s lead researcher. “We believe that, through partnership, community leaders, the community itself and UAB, we can improve the lives of children in our state.”
