"Poopgate", a.k.a. "The Crappening"

The Dave Matthews Band Bus Incident

On 8 August 2004, the driver of a touring bus used by the Dave Matthews Band emptied its blackwater holding tank into the Chicago River.

Or at least that was the plan...

One of the many open-top architectural tour boats happened to be passing under the bridge at the time. Approximately 360 kg of untreated human waste poured onto the boat's passengers.

Known immediately as "Poopgate" and more recently as "The Crappening", the incident led to the band paying $200,000 in a legal settlement with local environmental protection projects, and donating a further $50,000 each to the Friends of the Chicago River and the Chicago Park District.

Here's the view looking south from the Kinzie Street Bridge. Toilet-related photojournalism relies upon careful framing and timing. Notice the sticker on the bridge rail reading "I SURVIVED DAVE MATTHEWS BAND POOPGATE 2004", the tour boat headed south on the North Branch of the Chicago River, and in the distance, an El train crossing the South Branch with skyscrapers of Chicago's Loop district beyond.

The Chicago River

As the glaciers of the most recent ice age retreated, a ridge only about four meters high, about two kilometers inland, separated Lake Michigan and the other Great Lakes from the Mississippi River Valley. A narrow strip along the shore drained into the lakes, beyond that all the land drained into streams that joined the Mississippi River, which flowed south to empty into the Gulf of Mexico.

The native people named the area after a type of wild leek that grew along the banks of the short branched river that drained into the lake. When French explorers arrived in the 1670s, they wrote the native name for the plant and the area as Shikaakwa or Chicagou, reasonable French transcriptions of the native name. The French explorers were excited to discover the relatively short portage between Lake Michigan and streams connecting into the Mississippi. Jean Baptiste Point du Sable, the first non-native permanent resident of Chicago, built a farm along the river where the current North Michigan Avenue Bridge crosses it. The city then grew around his farm and the river.

The new city of Chicago got its drinking water from Lake Michigan, as it still does today. But as the city grew, garbage and sewage and other pollution discarded into the river flowed into the lake, contaminating drinking water and causing typhoid and other diseases.

The South Branch of the Chicago river began at a marshy area called Mud Lake, and that branch of the river came to be called Bubbly Creek. Both names suggest its noxious nature.

In 1900, the Sanitary District of Chicago reversed the flow of the main stem and the South Branch of the Chicago River by connecting it through a series of locks to the just-completed Chicago Sanitary and Ship Canal, which then connected to the Des Plaines River. That flows south to join the Kankakee River and form the Illinois River, which flows southwest to empty into the Mississippi River a short distance north of the mouth of the Missouri River and the city of St. Louis, Missouri.

In 1906 Upton Sinclair's The Jungle was published in book form. It exposed the harsh working and living conditions of workers in the meatpacking plants of the Chicago Stockyards, along with the health code violations and unsanitary conditions of the industry. These stockyards and meatpacking plants were along "Bubbly Creek", dumping carcasses and offal into the Chicago River.

President Theodore Roosevelt had initially dismissed Sinclair as a "crackpot" because of his socialist leanings, writing "I have an utter contempt for him. He is hysterical, unbalanced, and untruthful." But then he read The Jungle and agreed with some of what Sinclair had written.

Roosevelt sent men to Chicago to inspect meat packing facilities. Their report along with public pressure led in 1906 to the Federal Meat Inspection Act and the Pure Food and Drug Act.

The meatpacking industry was much improved, but the Chicago River remained heavily polluted. At least the garbage and sewage of the city of Chicago now flowed southwest into Illinois, instead of into Lake Michigan near the city's drinking water intakes. The city of Chicago greatly improved the condition of the river during the 1990s. However, in 2004 many people still had an "Out of sight, out of mind" attitude toward it.

The Incident

The Dave Matthews Band formed in Charlottesville, Virginia, in 1991. Its five members were initially Matthews, a singer-songwriter and guitarist, the bassist Stefan Lessard, the violinist and backing singer Boyd Tinsley, the saxophonist LeRoi Moore, and the drummer and backing singer Carter Beauford.

In early August 2024 they were staying at the Peninsula Hotel while they performed for two nights at the Alpine Valley Music Theatre in East Troy, Wisconsin, a small town just across the state line.

The band had arranged to use five buses, one for each member of the band. The driver of the violinist's bus was alone in the bus as he drove to the hotel. Crossing the Kinzie Street Bridge over the North Branch of the river, he stopped and emptied the blackwater tank, the septic holding tank of the bus, through the steel grating deck of the bridge.

Riveted anti-slip steel grating is made from thin bars of steel with serrated edges on top. Rain pours straight through. If snow or ice start to build up, a vehicle driving across will break any ice and force it and the snow through the triangular openings.

Liquified human waste will, of course, pour straight through the bridge deck.

Riverboat tours were already popular in 2004, offering close-up views of the diverse architecture of the Loop and River North areas of downtown Chicago.

The first bridge across the Chicago River was built across the North Branch, very close to today's Kinzie Street Bridge. So, there was already history associated with this spot, over a century before the bus toilet incident.

Roughly two-thirds of the 120 passengers on board the tour boat were soaked by the sudden deluge of human waste. The Illinois Attorney General's filing described the incident as:

The liquid waste was brownish yellow in color, and had a foul, offensive odor. The liquid human waste went into passengers' eyes, mouths, hair, and onto clothing and personal belongings, many of which were soaked. Some of the passengers suffered nausea and vomiting as a result of exposure to the human waste.

The boat immediately returned to its dock and all passengers received full refunds for their interrupted tour. Five of them were transported to Northwestern Memorial Hospital for testing. The boat was thoroughly cleaned and returned to service for its 3:00 PM tour.

A security camera at a nearby gym had captured video of the incident, which the driver had denied.

It seems like the owner and operator of the bus should have been financially responsible, instead of the band having to pay the legal settlement. But then I don't know much at all about legal matters. And, the driver pled guilty and was sentenced to 150 hours of community service, a $10,000 fine, and 18 months probation. The band promised to maintain logs of when their buses empty their wastewater holding tanks.

I happened to be visiting Chicago shortly after the 20th anniversary of the Incident. Posters around downtown sought victims to be interviewed for a planned documentary about the Incident.

Wait a Minute, Do the Numbers Add Up?

360 kilograms of human waste seems like an awful lot for just one violinist. Even if he was accompanied by support staff such as a bow rosin wallah, plus a modest entourage, 360 kg is still an awful lot of human waste. However...

The buses didn't belong to the band, they had hired the buses and drivers from a local company. And, how long had it been since the tank was empty, how many previous customers had contributed to the load before it was dumped that one day?

If the bus toilet was crude, like what you find in a Greyhound inter-city bus in the U.S., the toilet might have been a stainless steel box with blue fluid sloshing around, like what you see in the first picture below.

However, a company that rents buses to successful rock bands would probably have something far more up to date. For example, the one I encountered on board a bus in Chile, shown in the last picture above.

These modern mobile toilets use powerful vacuum flushing through a narrow aperture, much like what you find on airliners.

With all waste pulled into an enclosed tank, not visibly sloshing around like the crude Greyhound system, you could build up a nearly full tank load before realizing it. Although that doesn't excuse dumping into the river in the middle of the city, where there are tour boats and kayakers and people walking along paths lining the river.