What's the strangest thing you've had to pump out of a unit?

Question

After ten years driving a vacuum truck, I've pulled some strange items out of portable toilets. A full set of car keys from a standard unit on a construction site. A hard hat from a deluxe unit at a weekend wedding. A pair of brand new work boots from an ADA-compliant unit at a factory. The weirdest was a rubber duck from a restroom trailer at a county fair. That trailer served about 500 people a day for a week, had food vendors everywhere, and our truck had to navigate through mud to reach it. What's the most unexpected object you've retrieved from a holding tank? Any particularly odd finds in your years on the route?

Sam O. · Answer

A prosthetic leg was the strangest thing I ever pumped out of a standard unit. It was on a construction site with about 50 workers, so they had two standard units and one ADA-compliant unit to meet the OSHA 1926.51 minimum. We serviced them weekly, but this was a midweek emergency call because someone reported the toilet was backing up. The leg was wedged in the outlet pipe. I have no idea how it got there or why, but it took us an extra hour to clear the line. We see tools, gloves, and sometimes clothing, but that leg was a first. The site supervisor just shook his head and said he didn't want to know. After that, the rental company added a note to their service orders for that site to check for large objects. It's one of those stories that sounds made up, but it happened.

What's the strangest thing you've had to pump out of a unit?

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