Baltimore Or Less

Disgraced Former Baltimore Mayor Sheila Dixon visited the shit plant before her sentencing and resignation from office.

By J.K.O’Neill (The Dundalk Eagle, 11/24/198, updated 04/03/2008)

As most people around here know, those golden, egg-shaped towers that rear in majestic, near-eldritch splendor over Eastpoint Mall, North Point Boulevard and the Beltway have something to do with the city-owned Back River Wastewater Treatment Plant, that good neighbor that has brought such joy into the lives of area residents for nearly a century.

But, prior to this week’s question, I, like many others, had no idea what these towers were supposed to do. Why they were painted gold seemed an easy question to answer. Obviously the City of Baltimore, in its infinite wisdom, wished to have a sewage treatment plant that was, on sunny days, visible from space. This was done so that passing aliens, curious as to our level of civilization, could quickly and conveniently establish that we had developed advanced technology to eliminate our elimination, and thus determine that we are not so easy to conquer. According to this plan, the aliens would then go elsewhere for easier pickings.

Thanks, Baltimore City, for preventing alien invasion and preserving life on Earth. Baltimore City, however, is too humble to acknowledge the vital role that it plays in planetary defense. For this reason, a spokesman for the city’s Department of Public Works tells a different story. He states that these towers are anaerobic digesters. As you can probably tell by this name, the rest of this story gets icky. The “eggs,” built in 1992, each hold 3 million gallons of solid and liquid waste and process this waste through, according to a DPW document, “a biological treatment where anaerobic bacteria [meaning germs that don’t need to breathe oxygen] decompose and stabilize organics [meaning that stuff you don’t mention in polite company] in thickened sludge.”

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