It was just a lovely summer day on August 8, 2004, when Chicago’s Little Lady took off on the 1 p.m. Chicago Architecture Foundation tour. At that same time, a tour bus for the Dave Matthews Band — in town playing a two-night show at Alpine Valley Music Theatre in East Troy, Wisconsin — was making its way through the Loop.
While traveling over the Kinzie Street Bridge, the bus driver made the highly unusual (and illegal) choice to dump the coach’s septic tank through the bridge’s street grates and into the river. Just then, naturally, the tour boat was passing underneath. As Chicagoans know: When it rains, it pours — some 800 pounds worth of human waste over two thirds of the 120 passengers on the boat’s deck.
Because the bus belonged to a famous band, the story took on a life of its own. In the end, the group known for its environmental activism had something of a skid mark on its record. It’s a tale that is stuck in the minds of otherwise jaded emergency medical specialists. And it’s gone on to become a part of our cultural zeitgeist.
While some people are born into greatness, others have it flushed upon them.
I. “We basically hit it like the Maid of the Mist”
BRETT MCNEIL, a newspaper reporter at the time and now an investigator for the Northern District of Indiana Federal Community Defenders: I had a girlfriend whose ex was visiting from Boston. We were just looking for something to do. I was a newer Tribune reporter, and so worked a lot of those Sunday shifts, but I had a rare Sunday off. We decided to do a boat tour. It was truly beautiful. Perfect weather. At that time, the river was not nearly as busy as it is now with just pleasure craft.
LYNN LAPLANTE, a professional violinist and now DuPage County Board member: We were leaving from the South Loop, driving down Michigan Avenue. We were headed out to the suburbs to go to my parents’ house. I’m a violinist and I was going to play for a wedding at church with my mom and then just spend a lovely day together with my parents.
MCNEIL: Ten minutes in, we’re kind of motoring at that low speed northbound on the North Branch. We approached the Kinzie Street Bridge, which at that point on the river, it crosses at an angle. The boat entered straight under the bridge. Everybody was sitting on the deck in plastic chairs, like deck chairs. Nobody was downstairs.
LAPLANTE: I was pregnant with my second and my first was a little toddler. All my pregnancies, I had horrible morning sickness — but it would last all day. Because of that, I couldn’t be in the passenger seat, because I would get car sick within minutes. So I was driving and windows were down — I just remember it being a really nice day.
MCNEIL: As we approached, the bus was moving from northeast to southwest across the bridge, and as it hit the bridge, it opened the toilets, which then began cascading down. So it’s like the bus was towing a rooster tail of toilet waste. We basically hit it like the Maid of the Mist. It was a waterfall of toilet water that we passed under. Not all parts of the boat were hit, and certainly not all parts of the boat were hit equally. Some people in the back of the boat had a much better view of the bus.
I was confused about what it was. I thought it was either a street sweeper or one of those trucks that you’ll see with the big water tanks, and they use them to water the flower beds and the flowers along Michigan Avenue. That was my initial thought.
LAPLANTE: We were just chatting, and all of a sudden we drove through something, a wall of smell. I don’t know how else to describe it. Like we had just walked into an outhouse, and that immediately triggered my lovely condition of throwing up all throughout my pregnancy. I’m still driving and I’m sticking my head out the window to throw up, it was horrible. It was like a nightmare. I’m crying, as you can imagine, while I’m throwing up, while I’m driving, and my husband is screaming, “Pull over, pull over, pull over!”
MCNEIL: This all happened pretty quickly. It’s like a car crash. Things slow down. It’s bewildering. Your mind is trying to process what it’s just seen. The boat continued past the bridge, the bus disappeared south. And then there was like an unmistakable smell.
It was obvious that it was a bus, and it opened its toilets. People began to scream. They got very angry. Some people then started vomiting. The docent, he didn’t really know what to do. In my memory, the docent said, ”It appears that some water has hit the deck,” and a man from the back said, “That’s not water, buddy. That’s urine.”
LAPLANTE: We exited and went to a car wash. When we got out, the car was covered: all through the wheels and in the wheel wells, and on the side of the car with what looks like waste, sewage. I just remember us sitting on the curb and my husband trying to clean up my hair with paper towels as I just sat there crying and retching. It was not one of my finer moments.
MCNEIL: What boat is equipped for this particular emergency? They (staff) were handing out paper towels, they were present. They were on the mic, “We’re going back. Please sit down.” The captain and her crew, they met the moment, such as they could and such as it made any sense to anybody.
We walked over to the Billy Goat, and I cleaned up in the men’s bathroom. And then I called the city desk [at the Tribune] to say, “Hey, I was just on this boat, and we got dumped on from some bus toilet.” There was audible laughter in the newsroom.
They said, “Well, why don’t you go back to the dock and do some interviews?” At that time, it was not at all clear that this would even be a news brief.
About two-thirds of the passengers on the architecture tour were hit with the brownish-yellow liquid from the bus. Some of the waste ended up in passengers’ eyes and mouths and soaked their hair and clothing. Five individuals went to Northwestern Memorial Hospital for tests.
ANONYMOUS*, a physician who previously worked in the emergency department at Northwestern Memorial Hospital: People just trickled in and presented to the triage in the emergency department to be evaluated after this exposure. In my zone, I had one patient and there started to be a little bit of a buzz around the department as people got the story.
I don’t believe anybody suffered any acute injury or illness, but rather, it was the exposure. I’ll say that it raised interesting, fascinating questions about post-exposure prophylaxis to various potentially transmittable diseases, and it led us to have conversations with other specialists to discuss what, if anything, should be done.
Chicago’s Little Lady staff immediately cleaned the boat after the incident and all passengers were given refunds for their $25 tickets. In McNeil’s recollection, people from the boat began talking about the offending vehicle looking like a tour bus. According to a Chicago Tribune report soon after the incident, Chicago police did not initially think a crime was committed, but then-Mayor Richard M. Daley urged anyone with information to come forward. “This is unacceptable — putting any type of raw sewage into the Chicago River,” Daley said. “We are going to find out who they are. … We will take appropriate action.”
II. “My press secretary was quite busy”
The Illinois Attorney General’s office, then led by Lisa Madigan, opened an investigation into whether any state environmental laws were broken. The boat crew and witnesses were interviewed, and one individual gave police an Oregon license plate number that belonged to a luxury tour bus for the Dave Matthews Band.
Jerry Fitzpatrick, one of the band’s drivers whose license plate was identified, denied his involvement and said he was parked in front of the Peninsula Hotel — where the band was staying — at the time of the incident. A publicist for the band also issued a statement saying their management had determined that every one of the buses in the band’s fleet was parked at the time of the incident. Fitzpatrick, who was in Effingham, Illinois, when reached by a Tribune reporter, even asked Sgt. Paul Gardner of the Effingham Police Department to inspect the bus’s septic tank to prove that he could not have emptied it. He gave his cell phone to Gardner, who told the Tribune reporter that the tank was nearly full.
“This band is very environmentally conscious,” Fitzpatrick told the Tribune. “We wouldn’t have anything to do with this sort of thing.”
LAPLANTE: I remember calling my best friend later. I would always call and tell her horrible, disgusting pregnancy stories. We just had this running joke. She’d say, “Where’d you throw up today?” And I’d be like, “Oh, I was at the Jewel and the smell of the chicken made me run out and leave my cart.” So I told her the story, and she’s like, “What do you mean? You drove through a puddle of sewage?”
Maybe two days later, she called and she goes, “Have you seen the Tribune? Look, that’s what you drove through.”
LISA MADIGAN, then-Illinois attorney general: It’s a truly disgusting situation, and everybody had a visceral reaction when they heard what had happened — immediately disgusted when you imagine what it would have been like to be on the boat, recoil at the thought of being drenched in human waste. So we just immediately started thinking about … what’s the recourse here? People can’t just empty their toilet tanks into the river onto the heads of unsuspecting people. And in fact, that’s a violation of the environmental laws.
ANONYMOUS: Working in the hospital care setting, when something strange or scary or gross or concerning happens, that’s where you go. In general, we’re used to it, we’re kind of jaded. We’re not very impressed with scenarios that would gross a layperson out. But this one was… people were talking about it for a long time afterward in the department.
MCNEIL: Once the Dave Matthews Band was linked to this event, of course, it became a completely different animal.
MADIGAN: We were receiving media requests from around the world, and it was TV, Rolling Stone, people in Australia. So my press secretary was quite busy.
We got a request from Good Morning America. They wanted me and I think one of the individuals who had been on the boat to do a live interview. And so we go to the studio, and I’ve got the earpiece in my ear, and I remember the producer saying to me, “Please remember this is morning TV. People are eating their breakfast. Please don’t say anything gross.” I just laughed: I’ll try, but everything about this entire incident is gross and disgusting. I think that’s the whole reason this is a story.
Whenever it was that it got into the public that, allegedly, it was a Dave Matthews Band bus driver that had dumped this human waste while he was crossing the bridge, and it landed on a boatload of people taking an architectural tour and into the river — I mean, that’s when the calls started happening.
As part of the investigation, Madigan’s team and Chicago police detectives obtained surveillance cameras from neighborhood businesses. They traced the offending bus to Stefan A. Wohl, a Texas man who was identified as one of five drivers for the Dave Matthews Band. A three-count civil complaint was then filed by the attorney general’s office in Cook County Circuit Court. Wohl was driving the bus used by band violinist Boyd Tinsley, who was not on board when he crossed over the metal grates of the Kinzie Street Bridge and released the septic tank.
The complaint also explained that such luxury coaches are equipped with 80- to 100-gallon waste tanks that are emptied underneath the vehicle by flipping a switch behind the driver’s seat. According to a statement from Madigan at the time, at least 800 pounds of liquid human waste was released on the unsuspecting passengers and the river that day. The suit accused the band and driver of violating state environmental and nuisance laws, seeking $70,000 in fines and an evaluation of the band’s waste-disposal practices.
MADIGAN: I had the authority to enforce our state’s Environmental Protection Act, and that’s the main statute that we used. Surely it was a count of water pollution. Surely there was a count for discharging a contaminant into a waterway without a permit. And I think we may have also charged public nuisance. It’s a pretty broad statute, but those are the three things that we were able to bring. As soon as the video came out, any attempts to deny that evaporated.
In releasing the surveillance video to the public in a press conference, Daley called the dumping “absolutely unacceptable” — but also said the Dave Matthews Band was “a very good band.”
Wohl pleaded guilty to the original charges filed against him in January 2009. He was sentenced to 18 months probation, 150 hours of community service, and the maximum $10,000 fine, to be paid to Friends of the Chicago River. As part of its settlement, the Dave Matthews Band agreed to pay $200,000, which went into a fund for environmental protection and other projects. The band also donated $50,000 to the Friends of the Chicago River and $50,000 to the Chicago Park District. Some passengers filed separate personal injury suits, along with some insurance claims with the tour operators seeking compensation for clothing and personal items that were ruined.
MCNEIL: I happened to meet a guy who had one (a luxury coach). He bought this tour bus that happened to be Bob Seger’s at one time. And so I was like, hey, these buses, can you remotely dump the toilets? And he said, “Absolutely.” He showed me all about how you can do it from the driver’s seat. So the technology exists to dump the toilets from the road, from behind the wheel under power, and it’s existed for a long time.
The reason that the guy would have done this is to avoid the dumping fees that he would have had to pay for blackwater in Chicago. To me, the bigger story, the subtext was always: If this guy’s doing it — and he’s an out-of-town hack — who else is doing it? Efforts to clean up the river were obviously being subverted by these fly dumpers, for lack of a better term.
MADIGAN: It was one of those horrible incidents where you’re reminded that truth is always stranger than fiction. I mean, who could make this up, right? For the passengers on the boat, it was definitely the worst possible case of right place, wrong time. But I’ve never dealt with anything like this since.
MARGARET FRISBIE, then-deputy director and now executive director of Friends of the Chicago River: We were very saddened and shocked by it — and then not shocked, because obviously the Chicago-Calumet River system, still in 2004, was really viewed as part of the sewer system. It was more of, oh, this is something that somebody wouldn’t even think twice about because they’re not really understanding how far the river has come and how much cleaner it is.
We were fielding questions about general water quality. It was more of the cultural piece, that would have been the role that Friends [of the Chicago River] would play. This river is so much cleaner than it used to be.
The idea that you could just dump sewage in this waterway that has people on it, and there’s wildlife. This river is recovering, and this kind of incident sets it back and makes people think that it’s really super polluted when, in fact, it’s not.
III. “It’s one heck of a story”
The fines were paid, community service was performed, and donations were made — but the story didn’t go away. In fact, it’s become a cultural touchstone, even garnering the nickname “Poopgate.” Media coverage of the incident continues in and outside of Chicago: In 2018, New York Magazine published a story in its “I Think About This a Lot” series about the dumping. On the incident’s 19th anniversary in 2023, the Riot Fest Historical Society attached a plaque to the Kinzie Street Bridge commemorating the event. And this year — in honor of its 20th anniversary — humorist and self-professed DMB fan Samantha Irby will host an event at The Hideout with DJ sets by The Hood Internet. The initial show sold out almost immediately, and a second show was added — which has also sold out.
LaPlante herself wrote about the experience in 2015 on her personal blog. Emails started rolling into her inbox from folks curious about her story and, a few years later, Tribune writer Steve Johnson discovered the post and interviewed LaPlante for the paper.
LAPLANTE: [Johnson] told me something I didn’t know, which was the tour bus was for the violinist of the band. So he was like, “Do you understand that? It was a violinist driving through another violinist’s bathroom, basically.” I hadn’t known that. I thought, Oh God, add one more thing to this tale, which makes it unbelievable.
LaPlante was running for the DuPage County Board for the first time when Johnson’s story ran, and she was initially upset and concerned about the level of publicity that it garnered. But now she embraces the humor of the story. She’s now running for her third term on the board and quips that, “With my car covered in sewage and my own vomit in my own hair, I’m still cleaner than most politicians.” In early 2023, Annie Rauwerda, who runs the Depths of Wikipedia social media accounts, asked LaPlante to read her viral blog post at an event she held in Chicago at Park West. She was met with folks who were already familiar with her story.
LAPLANTE: They had merch! They had Dave Matthews bridge incident merch. I was like, this is unbelievable. And there were people waiting for me that knew my name. I get calls from people around the country. I’m not exaggerating, four different filmmakers [have reached out].
MCNEIL: I sat for a documentary. There’s an element of high bullshit to this story, the tail end of the story, this sort of, “Will we ever know what happened?” We know what happened. The bus driver pled and he got a misdemeanor deal out of it. This individual says, basically, “I was railroaded. I didn’t do it. Perhaps one of the band members, the violin player in the jam band, he did it.”
FRISBIE: It’s funny, because I had figured out that it was the 20th anniversary, and we were like, is Dave Matthews coming to Chicago this summer? Because it would be so great to have the opportunity for the band, and Dave Matthews, to be able to stand up and say, “Look at what we did. We helped this organization develop water policy programs. We did not actually do this. We paid the fines. We actually invested in a better future for the Chicago River and tried to offset the harm that happened to the people that day.”
LAPLANTE: Chicagoans are known for humor, right? Second City started here! Improv! This is the home of so many comedians, so I don’t think we take ourselves super seriously. I think we’re able to laugh at ourselves and laugh at funny things that happen. I feel like the Dave Matthews Band incident is now akin to Mrs. O’Leary’s cow in terms of Chicago folklore.
MCNEIL: I think the staying power is that it’s a very unique Chicago event. It’s funny, it’s got a celebrity angle to it, and there’s a scatological element to it. It’s like a potty humor civics class.
*This individual spoke on condition that their name would not be used.