What would have been a better title for my thread about Dave Matthews' bus allegedly dumping its "brownish-yellow", "foul-smelling muck" into the Chicago River and onto a boat full of tourists?

Nasty gunk: An eyewitness account
'People sat in stunned anger'
Published August 10, 2004, 1:07 PM CDT

Tribune staff reporter Brett McNeil, who filed Monday's report on the foul liquid that drenched passengers on a Chicago tour boat, was one of those passengers. Here's his first-person account.

Mostly what I remember is people gagging.

Before that, I remember our lightly lisping docent say what a beautiful day it was to catch the city's river bend reflection on the green glass of 333 W. Wacker Drive. And, really, it was: just this cool and sunny day with billowy white-gray clouds floating in a deep blue sky.

We were puttering along the Chicago River, watching paddlers from the Flatwater Classic float by, craning to see the tops of sundry architectural marvels. A perfectly polite, boringly edifying way to spend the afternoon.

And then came a gush of goop raining across most of the upper-deck viewing platform.

From where I was seated, toward the front of the boat, I couldn't see what was dumping on us but figured it was a street cleaner or maybe one of those landscaping trucks that you see spraying arcs of water into the median weed beds along Ashland Avenue.

Somehow I got just the lightest little splash on my left shirtsleeve, while people two seats away were left squeezing gritty gunk from their sticky wet hair.

We passed under the bridge and the deluge seemed to pick up, getting stronger as the passengers toward the rear of the boat approached the waterfall. The stuff splat heavily on the deck, dousing dozens of white-haired ladies and gents in nylon windbreakers.

There was confusion.

Then the smell hit us.

An unmistakable stink: porta-potty juice.

"Oh, God." The woman next to me turned and said to no one, "I had my mouth open."

Another woman, whose white shirt was soaked in what looked like dirty wiper fluid, said nothing. She just stood up and surveyed the boat, her eyes registering what she was now wearing. Reflexively, she began heaving. She looked like she was drowning.

The docent was slow to understand the magnitude of what had happened. "It appears that some water has hit the boat," he said, ridiculously.

A guy from the back of the boat shouted: "That's not water, buddy! That's urine!"

The docent, still playing dullard, asked, "Should we go back?"

By then, though, the boat's crew was rushing in with wet naps and paper towels, and soon we were turning around and plowing back to dock in high gear. Damning the no wake zone, we sent recreational boaters splashing in our wake as Chicago's Little Lady churned for home.

People wiped off their glasses, took off their coats, and sat in stunned anger.

What could you do?

I was on the boat with my girlfriend and a friend of hers visiting from out of town. They, too, managed to avoid the worst of it and we hustled down into the boat's main cabin. There we could avoid the stench up top but could clearly hear people puking in the nearby bathrooms.

We sat downstairs, hugging the air-conditioner register for stench-free air, until back at the Michigan Avenue dock. I did not begin reporting about all this until after we'd gone to the Billy Goat Tavern and washed up in the bathrooms, which was a mistake.

Because I wanted to get my hands and face and hair clean, I didn't get the name of the guy who was standing on the sidewalk when I got off the boat wearing only his waterlogged khakis. Stripped to the waist, he was actually joking with a woman airing out her wet red dress.

"I feel like I'm in a bad Ben Stiller movie," he said.

Right, because in a *good* Ben Stiller movie...

@llen, Jo@n. Former coke dealer and user before hitting Hollywood and making it big. Has been clean for a number of years now and is well-respected and generally seen as being a very nice woman.

hahaha. man, this is making my day infinitely better just reading this.

Dave Matthews Band Blamed For Human Waste

Aug 24, 2004 6:01 pm US/Central
CHICAGO (CBS 2) Rock star Dave Matthews and his tour bus driver are facing a filthy lawsuit.

The Illinois Attorney General's office says they're responsible for dumping up to 100-gallons of raw human waste from a tour bus onto the Kinzie Street Bridge earlier this month.

The nasty mess rained down on passengers aboard a sightseeing boat two weeks ago.

The suit charges both the band and the bus driver with violating state water pollution laws, as well as common law public nuisance laws.

A spokesman for the band says all of its tour buses were parked at the time of the incident.

That's my next song title.

"What Would You Say -- Don't Drop the Big One"

Holy shit that was funny. I laughed out loud, really loud.

"DMB's Shit Hits Fans"

This was also funny.

"Hike Up Your Dress A Little More...And Shit On Some People."

Not funny at all. This ruined my laughter of the above comment.

See: the ppl vs. Creed

Maybe DMB will break up bcuz of this lawsuit!

Nancy Todor, an Elmhurst resident whose 43rd birthday was ruined when she got caught in the rain of waste, said a $70,000 fine seemed like an inadequate punishment for the band.

Perhaps, she said, Matthews should perform a concert for the sullied boat customers.

and punish them even more?

Cops show video in dumping case
Police say image pins down band

By Michael Hawthorne, Tribune staff reporter. Tribune staff reporter Gary Washburn contributed to this report
Published August 26, 2004

With a phalanx of detectives standing by and television cameras rolling, a curtain slowly parted Wednesday at police headquarters to reveal a fuzzy image of a long dark bus, projected on a giant screen.

A Chicago police commander then stepped forward to say the image proves that a tour bus for the Dave Matthews Band, a rock group known for its support of environmental causes, dumped a tankful of human waste onto a Chicago River sightseeing cruise.

Captured by a security camera at the East Bank Club, the time-stamped image shows a black and silver bus crossing the Kinzie Street bridge at 1:18 p.m. Aug. 8. Tourists on the architectural sightseeing cruise reported they were doused with a brownish-yellow liquid from a bus crossing the grated drawbridge around the same time.

The camera did not record the soaking. But the videotape shows that no other bus crossed the bridge for 15 minutes before or after, Belmont Area Cmdr. Michael Chasen said during the news conference.

"Clearly, this is the bus that discharged that fluid," Chasen said.

Police found the video during a two-week investigation that prompted Illinois Atty. Gen. Lisa Madigan to accuse the rock band and one of its drivers of violating state environmental and nuisance laws. The three-count civil complaint, filed Tuesday in Cook County Circuit Court, seeks $70,000 in fines and an evaluation of the band's waste disposal practices.

Mayor Richard Daley said Wednesday that city officials also may file criminal charges, though the offense likely would be considered a misdemeanor.

"The action of illegally dumping in the Chicago River is absolutely unacceptable," said Daley, who nonetheless described the rock group as a "very good band."

Police were able to identify the bus shown in the health club's surveillance video by tracing a license plate number provided by a boat passenger, Chasen said. Soaked and angry, the passenger combed the area and found a luxury coach parked in front of the Peninsula Hotel, where the Dave Matthews Band was staying while playing two concerts at Alpine Valley in East Troy, Wis.

A license plate check identified that bus as one of five leased by the rock group that were in town at the time, Chasen said. Later, the driver of another of the band's buses told police he had been driving from a Kinzie Street parking lot west of the river to pick up violinist Boyd Tinsley at the hotel around the time the waste cascaded onto the tour boat. The driver denied he was responsible for the incident, police said.

The state's lawsuit identifies the driver as Stefan A. Wohl, a Texas man who has worked for the Dave Matthews Band for at least the last three years. Pictures of the tour buses provided by the band showed that the one driven by Wohl resembled the one captured on videotape, police said.

The health club's security camera faces an iron gate leading to a walkway just east of the river, but it also records traffic passing on Kinzie Street.

John Vlautin, a band publicist, said the group stands by previous statements that none of its drivers was involved in the tour boat incident.

About two-thirds of the passengers on the upper deck of the tour boat were soaked with the foul-smelling muck. Some of the boat's 120 passengers suffered nausea and vomiting, and five went to Northwestern Memorial Hospital for tests.

"This is about the most disgusting thing anybody can think of," Madigan said Wednesday. "It's the stuff of nightmares."

Daley and civic groups have been working for years to erase the river's image as a stagnant, sewage-choked waterway. Dumping anything into the river without a permit is a violation of state law.

The river is the cleanest it has been in years, according to a recent state study. But as more people are drawn to the concrete-lined channel, officials are mulling whether it should be subject to tougher pollution standards.

Copyright © 2004, Chicago Tribune

Is Albini behind this?

Sounds like a job for... OJ Simpson!