Portable potties go up in smoke

A juvenile suspect has been identified but no charges have been filed in a weekend arson fire in western Iowa that wiped out more than three-dozen Porta-Johns. Terry Moores owns Moores’ Pumping and Portable Toilets in the Harrison County town of Woodbine.Moores says he lost 37 toilets, two trailers and a pickup truck in the fire. The plastic portable toilets had all been lined up in a cluster while they were in winter storage. He says a youngster apparently got into one of them Sunday and set a roll of toilet paper ablaze.Moores says the Iowa Fire Marshal’s Office is still investigating the incident. Since the Porta-Johns are virtually all plastic, it wouldn’t be expected they’d be a big target for an arsonist, but Moores says the rows of toilets went up in flames fairly fast.Moores says “you’ll never get it lit” if you go into a Porta-John and try to set it on fire with a lighter, but he says once the petroleum-based plastic is flaming, “it’s just gone.” Moores estimates the damage at 24-to-26-thousand dollars. He says the toilets were -not- insured and represented about one-third of his toilet inventory. He says he’ll simply buy more and “go back to work.”