Bizarre incident at Waterville Yard 07-17-2011

The folks at Waterville got an eyeful on Sunday morning:

Portland Press Herald wrote:Waterville Police Chief Joseph Massey said police do not know why a naked, crying woman crawled into a sewer pipe emerging from a cliff 25 feet above the Kennebec River on Sunday morning.
...
Massey said about 9:55 a.m. Sunday, an employee at Maine Central Railroad reported a naked woman had run through the railyard on College Avenue toward the river.

Read more at: http://www.pressherald.com/news/watervi ... 07-18.html

"People don't run around naked in the daytime."

I guess most people wait till night to run around Waterville Yard naked.

Probably didnt do anything for those waterville guys, now if a sheep had run through the yard...

How did that article assume it was bath salts? Bath salts this, bath salts that, bath salts EVERYWHERE! I honestly don't know anyone who even does this stuff and never have. They don't sell it in Maine(legally) anymore, its more expensive than other hard drugs(even cocaine)... I think this whole bath salts thing is a moral panic. The first thing on my mind was that she was raped. Not that she was on an obscure, expensive, hard to obtain drug.

It certainly sounds more like mental illness than drug ingestion, I would agree. It is also disheartening to see that the chief of police can not distinguish between a storm drain and a sewer pipe.....or are you people up in Maine still running your sewage directly into your rivers?

TPR37777 wrote:It certainly sounds more like mental illness than drug ingestion, I would agree. It is also disheartening to see that the chief of police can not distinguish between a storm drain and a sewer pipe.....or are you people up in Maine still running your sewage directly into your rivers?

Raw, untreated sewage flows right into that river. Its kinda sickening

Neither the State of Maine or the federal EPA is allowing any city to
discharge raw sewage into any body of water. This was a poorly
written story and the Chief of Police does not know what he talking
about if he was quoted correctly. This pipe is likely some sort of
storm drain.

Dick H wrote:Neither the State of Maine or the federal EPA is allowing any city to
discharge raw sewage into any body of water. This was a poorly
written story and the Chief of Police does not know what he talking
about if he was quoted correctly. This pipe is likely some sort of
storm drain.

CSOs and even full out sewer outfalls still exist in many places. Boston has been working for years to remove all of their CSOs and there are still many to go. Just because it's not allowed anymore doesn't mean the preexisting ones are just plugged at the snap of fingers.

I got that from the comments of that article by the way. I mean, the sewage pipe.

A look at a Bing map looks like there is no heavy industrial use in the area aside from the rail yard. Would a railroad yard dump sewer into a waterway ? I would assume for normal human needs that city plumbing would be adequate. I didn't realize that there's a nice 12-stall roundhouse up there. Next time I'm up there, I'll see if can get some shots. Regarding the "bath salts" (I've never heard of them before), usually emotional trauma and drug induced trauma can be readily determined at any hospital. I thought that calling it "bath salts" was kind of a reach, however it may be the case that they are seeing similiar activity up there and have determined it's source. Also know that a policeman on scene who casually mentions to a reporter that he thinks it's "bath salts" thinking that it's "off the record", gets reported as "police report the cause as bath salts".

Some bath salts can have interesting effects if ingested.

The term "bath salts" is actually a slang term; the drugs in question are not the same stuff that one would add to bath water (e.g., Epsom salts). The medical name for this new street drug is Methylenedioxypyrovalerone, or MDPV.

The creeps that sell the stuff at boutiques in malls label it as "bath salts" and print on the packaging "Not for human ingestion" to avoid it being listed as a controlled substance under the Drug Law.

Hmm. I did a quick web check and learned something new about "bath salts." Here I had assumed it was something discovered by accident, like maybe someone put some real salts in one of those aroma-therapy things and found an unintended side effect.

I had not heard about them also, but then again, I'm out of the loop now. From my "go to" source, they're highly dangerous as they contain a powerful hallucinogen which also induces depression, anxiety, super restlessness, and suicidal thoughts, among other dangerous effects. A lot of people aren't aware about these "designer drugs" which have popped up disguised as something that makes your bathwater fizzy. They make your brain fizzy, and had they not rescued the naked girl, she may have been about to take a leap into the water from that drainage pipe. My take on them is that the fact that they are readily sold makes them very dangerous as kids will assume that they aren't as powerful as "illegal" drugs like LSD, etc. due to their legality, and over-use.