Quite the crappy situation played out in California earlier this week when a man fell into a vault toilet trying to retrieve sunglasses he had accidentally dropped inside.
If you aren’t familiar with how vault toilets work, the bathroom facilities work without having to be connected to a sewer system. That’s great for places that are off the grid… but not so great for the people that have to use them. Why? Well, with no plumbing whisking away the waste, it just collects in the underground tank until a specialized truck with a pump comes to empty it out.
Similar to porta-potties, these toilets are still a nice alternative to relieving one’s self out in the open. But also similar to porta potties… they stink. And one man in California knows that all too well after he fell into a vault toilet set up near Shaver Laker. As the story goes, the individual was utilizing the bathroom when he accidentally dropped his sunglasses into the waste tank.
Any normal person would have problem said, “Damn, that sucks, but I’m not going over them.” However, these must have either been a lucky pair of sunglasses, or a really expensive pair, because the man went in after him. His plan wasn’t to go all the way in… but that’s how things played out.
We know that for a fact because the Fresno County Sheriff’s Office was called around 2:30 p.m. this past Saturday to help rescue a man who had accidentally trapped himself in the vault toilet. Authorities made their way to the Camp Edison area in the foothills of the Sierra Nevada mountains for what they call in their line of work a “confined space rescue.” For this case, you could add another descriptive word in there: a “sh*tty confined space rescue.”
It’s not a call the Fresno County Sheriff’s Office gets all the time (I hope), and though they might not be experienced in toilet waste tank rescues, they were able to get the man out of there. In total, the individual was apparently stuck in the vault toilet for 10 to 15 minutes. That’s one of those 15 minute periods that probably felt like an eternity.
Fresno County Sheriff’s Office Sergeant Chris Tullus told CBS47 that the rescue went as well as it could have, and the man hadn’t suffered any injuries and was going to be okay:
“Via a Spanish translator, they advised that the subject had fallen into the chemical storage tank. Law enforcement, Camp Edison staff, and fire personnel responded and were able to safely get him out, decontaminate him, and, he’ll be okay.”
There’s not word on whether or not the man successfully retrieved his sunglasses. Here’s the thing though… wouldn’t you want to get new sunglasses anyways? Even if you got them out of toilet tank, there’s no amount of cleaning in the world that would convince me they were 100% clean. Like I said earlier… these sunglasses must have been incredibly valuable in some form or fashion for a guy to go into a vault toilet storage tank after them.
You can view the local news story about the disgusting rescue mission below:
