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This week I put together a story on the business of porta-potty providers. My interest in the trade was spurred by the thought that portable toilets are required on every construction jobsite and that a glimpse into that business might provide a unique window into the state of the construction industry.

I was also aching to use some really cheesy puns like 鈥渂usiness is in the toilet.鈥� My editors nixed that, which is probably to my benefit.

As I suspected, after a few hard years, business is turning around for portable sanitation companies, which mirrors a general pickup in the construction industry right now. What I didn’t anticipate was the high level of competition that exists in the industry.

The article featured Tom Richmond, the local owner of a portable sanitation company called Willy Make It?, and his trials and tribulations to make a living. A pretty jovial guy, Richmond met me and our photographer Sam Tenney at a jobsite in Tualatin at the crack of dawn one morning to talk business.

He was full of great stories.

One in particular that I wasn’t able to include in the feature had to do with some disgruntled Super Bowl fans setting a couple of toilets on fire. Evidently, the alcohol-based hand sanitizer inside the toilets is highly flammable, and the incident resulted in the toilets melting down to plastic blobs and running down the gutter. As a result, Richmond doesn’t include hand sanitizer in high risk locations anymore: i.e. parks, school playgrounds and little league baseball fields.

As a mischievous kid who, once upon a time, may have tipped over a porta-potty or two on his way home from school, I appreciated the opportunity to see the other side of the coin.

Another valuable piece of knowledge that didn’t make it in the story: in a long line of porta-potties, the toilets in the middle will be the cleanest because they get used less.

鈥淒on’t go to the first two to three toilets,鈥� Richmond said. 鈥淕o to the toilet in the middle because people are lazy.鈥�