Ongoing History Daily: Dave Matthews and the poop dump
One of the gross things about tour buses—and there are many gross things—is that at some point you have to empty the onboard sewage tanks.
On August 8, 2004, Dave Matthews bus stopped over the Kinzie Street Bridge in Chicago. At that point, someone aboard the bus decided that this would be the perfect place to dump 800 pounds of human waste from the bus’s septic tank system. Unfortunately, no one thought to look under the bridge to see if anything or anyone was there.
Turns out there was: an open-roof sight-seeing passenger boat. The contents of the bus’s entire tank fully unloaded on that open-air deck, soaking roughly two-thirds of the 120 passengers onboard.
An investigation was launched and it was determined that driver Stefan Wohl was responsible. He was sentenced to 18 months probation, 150 hours of community service, and fined $10,000. The Dave Matthews Band paid further fines and reparations of $300,000.
