Constipation can be a blessing. A young American Foreign Service officer learned this the hard way in a washroom in Japan, that land of mystery far to the east where even the appliances are inscrutable.
It was there that the intrepid lad had his first encounter with the latest generation of Japanese robotic toilets. It was more than a toilet, really – it was more like a full-service electro-mechanical valet for all affairs of the human bare derriere. Looking deceptively like the familiar American porcelain model, the Japanese contraption came equipped with a digital keypad that resembled something torn from the cockpit of a fighter jet.
Nothing in mom’s toilet-training instructions had prepared him for this moment; all he wanted to do was flush, but the familiar chromium-plated handle had been replaced by an incomprehensible touchpad interface. The rules of etiquette required him to do something, so he began pushing the buttons. . .
One button prompted a pre-recorded flushing sound to mask any possible embarrassing sounds the user might be making. Another button brought forth a gust of warm air from the built-in backside blow dryer. Then he made the mistake of punching the bidet button; after that he could only watch helplessly as the robot toilet deployed an extensible squirt gun that began shooting a stream of warm water across the bathroom and onto the mirror. He felt obliged to mop up the mess with big wads of toilet paper.
Still. . . , he should consider himself fortunate; some folks have been seated when the unwelcome bidet spray began and were held captive by it: they couldn’t get up without soaking themselves all over. Foreigners stumble from these high-tech bathrooms with a new-found appreciation for the rustic simplicity of the traditional Japanese “squatter” toilet: no seat, just a round hole in the floor.
Few Japanese own one of these $4000 bare-derriere play stations; almost a third of Japan’s people live in homes without any flush toilet, much less one with an automatic seat warmer and a clock to remind its user how long he has been on the can. Then again, Japan became the second richest nation on the planet by recognizing the economic potential of highly-evolved pieces of unnecessary technology.
Back in the Nineteenth Century the inspired plumber Thomas Crapper added what should have been the crowning touches to the valveless cistern & siphon flush toilet: with the pull of a chain the entire contents of a wall mounted tank (the cistern) would fall through a wide-bore pipe and flush the bowl clean with a tremendous gush. The flush ended when the rush of water had been drawn down the waste pipe by a siphon built into the bowl. It was a thing of genius. Doughboys returning from England after the 1918 Armistice casually referred to this modern convenience by the name they had seen imprinted on it: [the] Crapper. Folks used this reference without embarrassment, just as they commonly referred to the newly invented phonograph as a Victrola. The embarrassment began when the word crapper sprouted a new noun and a verb, both of which were synonymous with another vulgar expression for solid human waste and for the exertion that puts that waste into the crapper.
Within a hundred years the flush toilet had become the standard appliance for human-waste disposal in the Western Hemisphere. It reached the plains of Alberta sometime in the late 1960s.
After Mr. Crapper and a host of other clever plumbers had taken the toilet to the summit of sophisticated simplicity all that was left to do was to protect this porcelain appliance from every human attempt to choke it. For example: attempts to introduce flush toilets into Africa proved frustrating. People raised in rustic circumstances were enchanted by a device that suddenly made stuff disappear, so they would choke their toilets with all the stuff they wanted to make disappear, stuff such as chicken bones and melon rinds. Manufacturers of toilets for the African market responded my making toilets with extra wide throats that could swallow African kitchen scraps.
African toilets aren’t the only recipients of inappropriate items. The Washington Times (2/28/02, p.A3) helpfully informs us that a study in Britain revealed that “…600,000 Brits have accidentally dropped their [cell] phones in the toilet…” According to my almanac there are about 59 million people in the United Kingdom (Britain), so a proportional number of phone drowners in America would be well over 2,800,000. One such American is Mr. Edwin Gallart. Once again quoting from the Washington Times (11/3/03 p.A8):
“Thousands of commuters and trains were delayed and rerouted while rescue workers tried to pull Edwin Gallart’s arm from a toilet on the Mount Vernon-bound train after it left Grand Central Terminal during rush hour. Gallart got his arm stuck in the toilet when he tried to retrieve his cell phone. When train employees were unable to free Mr. Gallart’s arm, police and firefighters had to cut apart the stainless-steel toilet. The phone was not recovered.” So once again another perfectly good toilet was done in by human folly.
The biggest physical threat to the modern toilet in America is fat people. Mr. Kent Demien, director of materials management at Wausau Hospital in Wausau, Wisconsin says many grossly obese patients and hospital visitors are far too heavy to be safely supported by the standard $350 wall-mounted toilet which can only accommodate humans up to 300 pounds. Mr. Damien sees a bright future for sturdier pedestal commodes that cost $750 and can support 2,000 pounds. Says Mr. Damien: “This is a new trend we’re seeing among the 1,400 VHA and UHC hospitals we serve.” It’s comforting to know that America has a toilet that can bear the stress of a one-ton lard ass.
Yikes! None of my guests has ever been that fat. Thus far my biggest toilet problem has been the convergence of the congressionally-mandated low-volume toilet and paper-happy teenagers. Of course they won’t plunge their arms up to the elbow into the soaking clot of paper that’s gagging the commode, that’s daddy’s job. So this daddy went to one of those plumbing supply outlets in the industrial part of town and bought one of those toilets with a pressure vessel hidden inside the tank. As the vessel fills, water pressure from the supply line compresses a cell of air trapped at the top of the vessel. This compressed air acts like a spring. When the toilet handle (a trigger, really) is pressed, the compressed air blasts the stored water into the bowl and down the siphon with the most satisfying, way cool, sound – sort of a cross between a roaring mountain cataract and the release of an 18-wheeler air brake. It absolutely shatters the humdrum tranquility of the pre-flush bathroom; the deafening roar reverberates between the glazed tile walls. It’s the closest an average joe like me will ever get to launching real torpedoes!
All of which brings us to the purpose of this essay, which is to answer the question that has perplexed plumbers and taxpayers alike: How could our government run up a bill of one million dollars building an outhouse?
The Great American Outhouse
Right about now some gentle readers are asking themselves “Is the author deranged? Has Tommy, perhaps, inhaled way too much methane while sniffing out the story of monumental outhouse construction?” Not at all. I assure you, fellow tax slaves, that every fact has been double checked; our hard-earned tax dollars have been lavished on numerous outlandishly overpriced outhouses and on the snobbish architects and bureaucrats who have been given license to re-imagine the outhouse in much the same way that Ramses the Second re-imagined the pyramid. Once you understand the culture of the U.S. Parks Department bureaucracy and the way its pet projects are promoted and funded, the construction of a million-dollar outhouse will seem inevitable. But first. . .
A Little History
Architects are seldom called upon to design an outhouse. I have an impressive-looking diploma from Parsons School of Design (Manhattan) where I spent a few years studying architectural and industrial design. At no time was the word outhouse ever mentioned. The index of my thick 1970 edition of Architectural Graphic Standards does not include the word “outhouse.” And yet, prior to, and well after, the dawn of the flush toilet millions of these structures rose and fell in every populated part of America. They were the original really-little house on the prairie, and every where else.
Modesty, biology and family economics dictated that most outhouses would be compact, have a hinged door and be located between 50 and 100 feet from the family dwelling, preferably not uphill. Smart farmers positioned their outhouses out of sight behind the woodpile; that way the modest womenfolk could always pretend that they were on a mission to gather firewood and would always return to the house with a few pieces of wood to maintain the ruse, thus the women maintained their dignity and the smart farmers never had to fetch any firewood.
Outhouse construction was simple, robust and easily understood. The typical outhouse floor measured 4 by 4 feet, was 6-foot-six high in the front and 5-foot-six in the back; the shingled shed roof had a back-to-front rise-to-run slope of 1 to 4. The waste pit was dug 3 and a half feet square to a depth of 4 feet eleven inches. A hinged door would complete the pinewood palace. Most outhouses were single holers. Double holers might have a big hole for adults and a smaller one for children.
There were variations, of course. Some had gable roofs or more holes. There were also two-story outhouses with the upper-level accommodations offset to the rear; an interior wall ensured that the folks on the lower level didn’t get their hair mussed. Back then folks weren’t inclined to spend their hard-earned money on frills, such as toilet paper: old newspapers and catalogs in the outhouse weren’t there for anyone’s reading pleasure. The closest thing to an air freshener was a sack of powdered lime and a scoop for dusting the pit. Some “backwoods” outhouses were built without pits: a wooden switch was used to chase the chickens out from under the seat.
And what might an outhouse cost? Well, back in the day, many outhouses were constructed from second-hand materials. A couple o’ fellers recently built an outhouse from old oak pallets, those rough-hewn platforms that allow forklifts to juggle heavy pieces of machinery. Their total out-of-pocket was less than twelve dollars, mostly for nails and shingles and such. An oak outhouse should last for decades; it should outlast its builder. Almost half the timber cut in America each year is used to make pallets; there are lots of them just lying around; the government buys millions of pallets along with the stuff that comes strapped onto them. With a ready supply of discarded pallets any small company could produce pre-cut outhouse kits, just the way Sears Roebuck and Company once sold per-cut house kits. (Airplanes, too.) The economies of scale would be enormous. Of course, nothing is so simple that someone can’t screw it up and send the cost soaring into the stratosphere. Government bureaucracies have reduced the costly screw up to a laboratory science. For example. . .
How Bureaucrats Build Outhouses
Back in May of 1998 the General Accounting Office submitted a report to the Ranking Minority Member Subcommittee on National Parks and Public Lands. Members of the House of Representatives were curious about how the Parks Service was spending the taxpayers’ earnings. They were troubled to find that the Parks Service’s management had concealed the cost of several expensive future pet projects in a list of projects that were identified as a maintenance backlog. Was the Parks Service trying to pick our pockets to fuel a runaway edifice complex? The government watchdogs wanted to know.
Here’s a sample paragraph from the report:
“Concerns were expressed in an October 1997 hearing before the Subcommittee on Interior and Related Agencies, House Committee on Appropriations, regarding the high cost of constructing new facilities in light of the Park Service’s $6.1 billion backlog of maintenance needs. Recent projects, such as new housing at Yosemite and Grand Canyon national parks and the high-cost outhouse at the Delaware Water Gap National Recreation Area, raised questions about the reasonableness of costs for construction projects. During the hearing, Interior’s Inspector General testified that private sector construction of housing near Yosemite would be at least $334,000 less than the Service’s $584,000 cost per house and at least $158,000 less than the Service’s $390,000 cost per house at the Grand Canyon. Also during the hearing, Subcommittee members raised a number of questions regarding the $330,000 outhouse at the Delaware Water Gap National Recreation Area that cost more than 3 times the average cost of a new 2,000-square-foot home with three bedrooms and two baths in the same area.” [Emphasis added.]
Yup, an outhouse. There’s no running water; if you come for a visit bring HandiWipes. Just for starters, the Parks Service assigned more than a dozen engineers and architects just to design this two-holer, at a cost of $102,614. They were given two years to design it. To keep an eye on the contractor for 10 months, the Parks Service relocated a Parks Service engineer from Denver to Pennsylvania at a cost of $81,220.
The finished outhouse is preposterously overbuilt. Its 29-inch-thick fieldstone-and-mortar base could withstand a 9.5 earthquake, something that seldom happens on the east coast of America. The complex gable roof is clad in the best slate Vermont could quarry; for some reason Pennsylvania slate just wouldn’t do. The limestone capstones that trim the cottage-style porch walls were trucked in from Indiana. The clapboard siding is one-inch-thick cedar. To give it that Martha-Stewart touch, the designers specified a hemlock-matching shade of custom-mixed paint that cost $78 a gallon. To conceal the soil roughened by construction workers, the designers specified that the hillside be sewn with certified Joe Pye Weed seed at a cost of $750 a pound. (Burpee seeds are so last week!)
There’s no wooden switch to chase the chickens from under this two-holer. Buried beneath this outhouse are $13,000 state-of-the-art composting contraptions built by Advanced Composting Systems of Whitefish, Montana. Unlike regular outhouses, this one won’t work in cold weather, so the public is locked out in the wintertime.
One casual visitor to the Raymondskill Falls facility in the Delaware Water Gap National Recreation Area mistook this splendid outhouse for a visitor center. Because it is located in a remote ravine, its two holes are more than adequate.
Roger Rector, the superintendent who signed off on this glory hole in 1995 said, “We could have built it cheaper, yes, but we wanted someone coming up the trail or off the road to encounter a nice facility.” Nice? Nice?! When an ABC-TV researcher checked with local realtors he discovered that a huge nearby house, a beautifully restored and detailed house, complete with working plumbing, was for sale at a cost below that of this small, remote, New Age privy. “Frankly,” said Dennis Galvin, deputy director of the National Park Service, “that’s what we’re paying for toilets.” Really? I’d like to introduce him to a couple o’ fellers who built their outhouse for less than twelve bucks.
Jack Wilburn used to design and built permanent comfort stations on environmentally sensitive islands along the gulf coast of Florida and Mississippi; his privies cost us about twenty grand each. Speaking of the Pennsylvania outhouse design team Mr. Wilburn said: “They’re a bunch of prima donnas who just want to win awards for design excellence. Cost doesn’t bother them; they always want to do something monumental and unique.”
He’s suggesting that the monstrous cost overrun was motivated by an unrestrained desire to achieve artistic excellence. I suspect baser motives: congressmen love it when tax dollars are lavished on their districts. Rep. Joseph McDade (R-Pa.) will be remembered as the patron saint of the Pennsylvania privy, which lies within his district; he gave this pissoir the highest priority. As the Number 2 Republican on the powerful House Appropriations Committee he also saw to it that the 1998 budget included an additional $4.1 million for trail improvements near the outhouse. When a reporter flashed McDade photos of his pet outhouse, the congressman thought it was a resort cottage. “All I do is send them money,” said McDade, “I don’t try to micromanage the park.”
Worse yet, all of the Park Service architects work out of a centralized office in Denver called the Denver Service Center, which is funded by commissions that are a percentage of the cost of the projects they design. In other words, these “prima donnas” have every incentive to gold plate every project they touch: the higher the cost of a project, the bigger their take-home check will be.
Just for the record, back in the Delaware Water Gap area, portable toilets now in common use cost a mere $500 each. They can be leased and serviced for $65 a month from Pocono Potties of Snydersville, PA. Unlike the $330,000 outhouse, these potties function all year long. If Pocono Potties had been locked into a contract at the current rate, then for the stated cost of the government outhouse Pocono would have been obliged to service two potties at the same site for the next two hundred and eleven years.
All the comfort stations designed at the Denver Service Center are unique. One architect dismissed any thought of standardizing the designs as “sort of a Sixties concept,” as something that “has some merit for the military or McDonald’s,” but not for the Parks Service. One tiny park on a Potomac cove is getting a six-hole outhouse; the winning bid was $420,000. It will resemble a corn crib so that it won’t clash with real corn cribs in the area.
As for that $330,000 outhouse, the contractor says the cost was really more than $445,000, not including the parking lot, new signage and an improved trail. Since that disclosure, the Park Service has clarified its expenses: the real cost of this outhouse, for both construction and landscaping, came to $784,000.
Could the artists at the Denver Service Center top a $784,000 outhouse? Of course they could; their rising standard of living depends upon increasing the cost of projects from which they garner commissions based on the cost of each project. They had every incentive to shoot for the moon.
The Million Dollar Outhouse
A while back the Park Service began construction on an outhouse to complement a chalet in a remote wilderness region of Montana’s Glacier National Park. There was no pressing need to renovate the chalet or to build the outhouse, it was just a pet project of a small group of well-heeled hiking enthusiasts. Michael Mihalic, the park’s superintendent, said the Park Service has more immediate needs and that the money would be better spent elsewhere, but he had no choice in the matter: Montana’s three-member congressional delegation had insisted that the project be undertaken.
Although two million people visit Glacier National Park each year, only a few thousand of them will make the arduous trek to the remote chalet and its million-dollar privy. Or, to put that another way: because one million people is a thousand thousand people, only a few thousandths of those visiting the park will ever get near the million-dollar outhouse that is designed to last forever.
Ed Venetz, the private contractor who is supervising the construction of the two-story, stone-clad outhouse, said, “She’s just a Plain Jane, like sitting on a prison toilet.” So why does it come with a price tag to rival the gilded washrooms of Saddam Hussein? Well, for starters, the Park Service spent $260,000 on the six architects and engineers who designed the thing and for on-site supervision. Because the job site is not accessible by road, all 1.5 million pounds of equipment and building materials had to be flown to the 6,600-foot elevation by helicopter. The 500 flights cost about $300,000.
Unlike the typical outhouse, this one is situated on solid rock; fourteen feet of rock had to be drilled and blasted away to accommodate this uber outhouse. Because of fierce weather, construction is confined to only three months a year. Because the chalets are “historic,” the outhouse must match the chalet in style and detail. Then there are the state-of-the-art solar-powered composting units to meet rigid EPA standards and the back-up gas-fuel generator designed to function at sub-zero temperatures.
The wag in me longs to dub this mountain-top boondoggle Mount Flushmore, but nothing up there flushes; it’s more like Star Trek meets Green Acres on a mountain top in Montana. “This project is clearly overpriced for the return,” said Bob Heim, a board member of the Montana Wilderness Association, which had proposed a less expensive alternative plan for keeping the chalets in operation. “The people who visit the park are not staying in these [64-bed] chalets.” He says that for the same money the Park Service could have built a much-needed new visitor center “that would have served 100% of the visitors.”
“We have greater needs,” said David Mihalic, Glacier’s superintendent. “If somebody handed me $2.5 million and asked, ‘Where would you best put it?’ the chalets would be far down the list. The problem is, no one did it that way.”
That’s right. What did happen is a lesson in just how influential a small group of politically savvy well-heeled lobbyists can be, especially in a sparsely-populated state such as Montana where all pressure can be brought to bear on a small congressional delegation.
This situation is far from unique; it reminded me of the way efforts to combat diseases are funded in America. In the year 2001, heart disease, which is America’s number-one killer, was funded at a rate of $58 per patient. By contrast, AIDS, which ranks 18th as a health menace, was funded at a rate of $4,439 per patient. That same year, diabetes, which killed more Americans than AIDS and breast cancer combined, was funded at a mere $41 per patient, which is less than 1% of the AIDS funding rate. The funding is so lopsided because AIDS is a disease that threatens a comparative handful of wealthy male homosexuals. About 70% of gays enjoy professional employment; as a group they are well-educated and politically adroit, so gays get a disproportionate amount of pampering from politicians. In Montana the hikers lobby has this same kind of clout. That’s why, despite all the criticism that the first million-dollar outhouse provoked, there are plans to build a second million-dollar outhouse on another remote Montana mountain, deep in the wilderness where few people will ever go. Few of the taxpayers whose earnings fund these preposterously overpriced crap holes will ever set foot inside Montana.
The Park Service had originally promoted the Glacier National Park boondoggle as a public-private enterprise. Back in April of 1994 the Park Service had vowed that “The project will not be undertaken without strong private-sector financial support.” A group called Save the Chalets was supposed to chip in $1.2 million. In truth, there was no public enthusiasm for this elitist project and Save the Chalets never delivered on its promise. After that, the language requiring private financing as a pre-condition was quietly dropped from the revised April 1995 Park Service proposal. The Park Service’s management insists that it did not mislead the public. Senator Conrad Burns, a Republican member of the appropriation subcommittee that controls Park Service spending managed to keep a straight face as he announced, “I do not see this as a pork barrel project. We are going to get it completed one way or another.”
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Thomas Clough
Copyright 2005
March 18, 2005