by Jeremy Howe
Jeremy Howe worked for major mining companies for thirty years and now lives on an island off the coast of British Columbia, Canada. Below he tells a tale of waste disposal, unwilling drillers, and an explosive end. Do not read this piece while eating.
Back in the early to mid ‘90s, I was involved in mineral exploration and drilling on northern Devon Island in the Canadian Arctic.
At 75 degrees of latitude, it was definitely ‘up there’: the permafrost that turned earth into a single rock-hard mass presented considerable challenges when it came to that eternal question of how to dispose of one’s shit. The customary recourse to an outhouse with latrine pit was out of the question unless you had access to shaped charges of the sort the military uses to blow holes in the permafrost: and needless to say, we didn’t.
Fortunately, Weatherhaven Resources, our supplier of remote camp infrastructure, marketed a clever, if decidedly curious, device called a ‘Pacto’ toilet. This was a device the Swedes had come up with, albeit for reasons that remain elusive: I can’t imagine sales were ever especially robust.
Impressive post-digestive processing machine
“Once you’ve seen a “Pacto” at work, you know what ingenuity means.”
Improbable as it seems, this compact dump-compressor consisted of a seat perched above a metal funnel. The funnel was lined with a biodegradable plastic that deployed from a collapsed tube of the same. The tube ringed the funnel like a doughnut and was drawn up, out, over and down the inside of the funnel by a series of electrically powered drive gears whenever it was flushed (no water was involved, apart from user-provided fluids.)
In the neck of the funnel there was a clam-shell affair which closed after each flush, heat-sealing the turd-creator’s deposit and containing it in a reservoir below. The configuration is almost impossible to visualise without experiencing it yourself. But trust me: once you’ve seen a “Pacto” at work, you can only be astonished at its blistering ingenuity.
The end result of such applied brilliance was a long, coiled sausage of individually sealed (and largely odourless) turd packets. These were collected in a stout, biodegradable plastic sack which could be carted away and buried on some south-facing slope that would afford a depth of thaw more suitable to its internment (or inturdment, as the case may be).
The device featured a built-in safety mechanism to avoid over-filling the depository below the toilet – you simply set a dial so a warning light came on when the limit of ‘contributions’ had been reached and the machine needed to be emptied. As an added precaution, the flush drive would also be automatically disabled.
Fiddling with Turd Valhalla
“Those foresighted Swedes!’ I marvelled – prematurely, as events would show.
It was easy to reset the ‘dump dial’ on the Pacto. And the drillers I worked with quickly realised they could recalibrate it to ‘infinity’, thus enabling themselves to shit with impunity – and without the decency to advise when maintenance was required. As was often the case in camp, almost everyone refused to take responsibility for the output end of the eating equation.
The inadequacy of this alert feature was made violently clear to me one morning.
After a long evening of ironing out the usual cluster of equipment glitches under the midnight sun, I’d arisen late and sat in the kitchen tent with a cup of coffee while several of the others attended to their morning business on the “Pacto”.
As I brought my coffee to my lips, a cry of dismay pierced the air.
“The Pacto’s packed in!”
I ran to the outhouse where a red-faced student geologist was hoisting up his trousers. The toilet was an appalling scene – a heap of exposed excrement and shredded plastic filled the receiving funnel and everything below.
Struggling to contain my disgust, I pulled the reservoir from the back of the machine only to realise the safety control had been reset and the bucket was spilling over. The drive gears had drawn the already ‘processed’ evacuations back up into the mechanism, bursting them in the process.
Like something out of Conrad’s “Heart of Darkness”, it’s impossible to picture the fecal fiasco that our mechanical lavatory had become. However repugnant, there was nothing for it but to roll up my sleeves and try to clear the mess.
I almost heaved multiple times in the process but after an hour of bathing in a horror of excreta, I’d just about managed to remove the offending detritus when a distant voice bellowed:
“The water pump’s on fire!”
Stool-besmeared, I dashed from the outhouse to the ablutions tent where a geologist had coated the camp pressure pump with extinguisher powder. Our system relied on two 250-gallon water tanks that fed the camp plumbing. It turns out the geology student who’d been assigned to fill them had reneged on his duty. The pump went ‘Chernobyl’ trying to move water that wasn’t available and burst into flame.
Eventually, we’d fix the water supply by gravity-feeding water to the system but it didn’t address my immediate concern of having no hot water with which to purge my pathogen-encrusted limbs. I wanted a good twenty-minute scrubbing-down under the shower but was forced to opt for a cold water sponge bath of bleach from the kitchen.
I only returned to that cup of coffee shortly before lunch, utterly devoid of any appetite.
As a footnote, one thing I never quite grasped was why the Pacto tube of plastic was clear and not (more forgivingly) opaque. Why in God’s name does anyone need to know the consistency and content of the camp’s bowel movements? Given increasingly officious company protocols, no doubt we’d soon have to record it in some incident ledger. “Corn passed within eight hours of consumption. Cooking methods suspect.”
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