Last Thursday, a “sewer blockage” in the town of Melrose, Massachusetts, had city workers scrambling to restore flow across the town’s entire system. The blockage was eventually cleared, but not before it created what one affected resident described as a “tornado of poop” in her bathroom, after raw sewage exploded from her toilet and immediately rendered her home completely uninhabitable. Let us now gawk together in astonishment at a video of this spectacular scatological phenomenon:
What can you even do when your toilet starts boiling with untreated human feces, and untold gallons of rich poop water begin furiously gushing across your floors? How can you even hope to recover your home, your possessions, your sanity? There isn’t even time to grab your stuff when actual poop is exploding out of your toilet as if from a fire hose. Do you simply run away, leaving it all behind? Do you try to build a hasty flood wall out of your own precious linens? Do you give all the way in, embrace the disaster, and start making snow angels in the filth? Is there even a right answer, here?
Four different Melrose homes on one street were terrorized by the poop tornado, which apart from the devastating psychological damage destroyed walls and floors and turned bathrooms into something out of a horror movie. Sylvia Ortiz, who took the short video of her bathroom being absolutely wrecked by a deluge of her community’s poop, told the Boston Globe “everything is pretty much destroyed” in her home, and described the poop flood as “like molten lava coming out at me.”
Here’s a 7 News Boston segment on the disaster, with more views of the utter devastation wrought on the affected homes. Truly the poop tornado is not the kind of thing you want to go chasing in your storm-mobile.