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There are several articles and videos on the net claiming that the Burj Khalifa tower in Dubai is not connected to a wastewater treatment plant by a sewer system, but that instead the sewage is transported away using trucks. Examples:

Is this claim true?

oliver
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    If 4 different, independent websites claim the same thing, what will convince you it is true? How many more links will it take? And if a website claims otherwise, why will you believe that one? – hdhondt Aug 15 '21 at 10:22
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    @hdhondt: good question. It's just that a) the claim seems kinda unbelievable to me (who would spend lots of money and effort on an enormous skyscraper but not build a sewer system for it?), and b) I don't know whether these websites are reliable on this fact - maybe they have just copied from the same source, and maybe even omitted some key details (all of these articles are quite short, in my opinion). – oliver Aug 15 '21 at 10:30
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    The wikipedia page says nothing about the Burj Khalifa, which has been connected to the municipal sewer system from day one. – David Hammen Aug 15 '21 at 12:33
  • @oliver delete the wikipedia one, which is utterly confusing and has no connection to what you are asking – Fattie Aug 16 '21 at 15:30
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    @hdhondt: The number of references that a "fact" has on the Internet is not a reliable indicator of veracity. Numerous news media outlets and web sites routinely cite each other's source material without doing a fact check. – Robert Harvey Aug 16 '21 at 19:13
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    Wikipedia literally gives you cited sources. – NDEthos Aug 16 '21 at 19:16
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    @hdhondt This is the citogenesis problem. You have no guarantee that those 4 (or really, N) websites have collectively made more than one independent primary research on the topic. This is true regardless of the "mainsteam reliability" of a news source. – Kafein Aug 17 '21 at 13:20

2 Answers2

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This story has an inkling of truth, but the specific claim raised in the title of the question is false. The one link in the question that is correct (or at least was correct in 2015) is the link to the Wikipedia page, which does not mention the Burj Khalifa. Sewage from the Burj Khalifa is not transported away by trucks.

From Mechanical and Electrical Systems for the Tallest Building/Man- Made Structure in the World: A Burj Dubai Case Study

A complete soil, waste and vent system from plumbing fixtures, floor drains and mechanical equipment arranged for gravity flow and, ejector discharge to a point of connection with the city municipal sewer is provided. A complete storm drainage system from roofs, decks, terraces and plazas arranged for gravity flow to a point of connection with the city municipal sewer system is provided.

This story about the Burj Khalifa not being connected to the municipal sewage system got its start in a 2011 book by Kate Ascher, The Heights: Anatomy of a Skyscraper. In 2011, Terry Gross interviewed Kate Ascher for an episode of NPR's Fresh Air. They talked about skyscrapers in general, about the Burj Khalifa, and then about Dubai's treatment of human waste:

GROSS: Right. So you know, you write that in Dubai they don't have like, a sewage infrastructure to support high-rises like this one. So what do they do with the sewage?

ASCHER: A variety of buildings there [Dubai]; some can access a municipal system, but many of them actually use trucks to take the sewage out of individual buildings. And then they wait on a queue to put it into a wastewater treatment plant. So it's a fairly primitive system.

Note that Ascher did not claim in this interview whether the Burj Khalafa was or was not connected to the municipal sewer system. Apparently the specific claim started with a BoingBoing article written the very next day in a poorly researched article Gizmodo next used the BoingBoing article as the source for its poorly researched article.

SQB
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David Hammen
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    Wow, thanks for looking up where that wrong information came from! Your explanation makes a lot of sense to me. – oliver Aug 15 '21 at 13:59
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    Ascher did actually give that impression, or at absolute minimum fail to correct Gross incorrectly claiming it, per the [NPR transcript](https://www.npr.org/transcripts/141858484). *"ASCHER: The tallest building in the world is... the Burj Khalifa... GROSS: GROSS: Right. So you know, you write that in Dubai they don't have like, a sewage infrastructure to support high-rises like this one..."* Anyone reading/hearing that would make the same inference. – smci Aug 16 '21 at 01:19
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    @smci That certainly is a possibility. Ascher published her book in 2011, which meant the reporting on a 2009 incident in Dubai was still on her mind. Problems in one of Dubai's sewage treatment plants resulted in that plant being shut down for a few weeks. Some of that reporting implied that the vacuum truck solution used during those few weeks was what Dubai used all the time. – David Hammen Aug 16 '21 at 03:48
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    @smci However, when writing a news report, it is the reporter's responsibility to verify and validate claims. Terry Gross did not do that. Even worse, BoingBoing, and then Gizmodo, and then several others did not do that. Even worse, when years later other organizations experienced a slow news day, they repeatedly resurrected this false but titillating story. – David Hammen Aug 16 '21 at 03:53
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    Relevant XKCD: https://xkcd.com/978/ – nick012000 Aug 16 '21 at 05:35
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    Even on the face of it, the claim seems ridiculous. What if there's a fuel shortage? What if the sewage truck drivers go on strike? What if there are persistent sandstorms for days on end and nobody can drive? It seems like there could be any number of ways for this truck-driving scheme to fail, and then suddenly the Burj Khalifa has backed-up sewage. – Kyralessa Aug 16 '21 at 10:19
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    @Kyralessa Presumably the same thing as for other buildings and areas without a connected sanitary sewer: there's spare holding capacity, but if it runs out, they have a real bad time until things get sorted out. – Sneftel Aug 16 '21 at 10:40
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    @Kyralessa: it might actually be an interesting separate question whether the "poop trucks" are in wide use in Dubai at all, nowadays. At https://www.reddit.com/r/dubai/comments/10q3ub/poop_trucks_can_anyone_help_get_rid_of_this_myth/ someone wrote "The myth came around because there was a short period in 2009 when the treatment plant at Al Aweer got overloaded so there were huge lines of backed up trucks as the system could not cope." and "The majority of Dubai is now connected by pipes either to this or to the old plant at Al Aweer.". – oliver Aug 16 '21 at 11:07
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    @oliver Note that in that Reddit thread, the [OP of that thread later wrote](https://www.reddit.com/r/dubai/comments/10q3ub/poop_trucks_can_anyone_help_get_rid_of_this_myth/c8d2x4v/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=web2x&context=3) "The Burj definitely does have a sewage connection as I worked on it and saw it myself." – David Hammen Aug 16 '21 at 11:27
  • @Sneftel The point is that it's utterly beyond belief that the tallest building in the world wouldn't have a plan for dealing with sewage beyond "lots of trucks." – Kyralessa Aug 16 '21 at 11:29
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    @Kyralessa Believe me, the Burj Khalifa relies on the regular services of a *great number* of trucks, on a daily basis. Food service needs restocking. Light bulbs need replacing. Trash needs removing. The plan for dealing with all these things is "have spare capacity". – Sneftel Aug 16 '21 at 11:36
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    @Sneftel I believe you. But at least _most_ of these things aren't a complete disaster when they run out. Food can be gotten elsewhere. Light bulbs don't all burn out at once. Trash would be unsightly if piled high outdoors, and might not smell good either. But compared to a 828m-high building full of backing up toilets... – Kyralessa Aug 16 '21 at 11:41
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    @Sneftel The Burj goes through [250000 gallons of water per day](https://www.burjkhalifa.ae/en/the-tower/structures/) If the Burj was not connected to the municipal sewer system, that would require an Olympic-sized swimming pool (660000 gallons) septic tank to handle contingencies such as a multiple day sandstorm that halts traffic. – David Hammen Aug 16 '21 at 11:52
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    Which sounds absurd, but then building a nearly 1 km-tall tower *also* sounds absurd. My point was that dismissing the claim as "ridiculous on the face of it" because it assumes regular servicing is not necessarily the slam-dunk that the other poster intuited it to be. – Sneftel Aug 16 '21 at 11:58
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    @oliver They were still in use as of 2013, when the [BBC](https://www.bbc.com/news/av/business-22597447) reported on one of Dubai's two municipal sewage plants. Per the report, most of the waste (70%) treated at the plant in 2013 came directly from the city's sewage lines. The remaining 30% arrived via vacuum trucks (colloquially, "poop trucks"). Per the video, most of that 30% "came from laborer accommodations at the outskirts of the city." – David Hammen Aug 16 '21 at 12:12
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    @oliver Also note in that video that the capacity of one of those vacuum trucks is shown. It's printed on the back of the truck: 10000 GL. If that's gallons, it means 25 trips per day. If it's liters, it means 100 trips per day. Extra capacity would be needed to handle a day-long dust storm that temporarily suspends traffic. That's a large fleet of vacuum trucks. The cost of an Olympic swimming pool-sized septic system plus the cost of a large fleet of large vacuum trucks is much larger than the cost of a connection to the municipal sewer lines. – David Hammen Aug 16 '21 at 12:34
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    @Kyralessa Then (if the city's living conditions are as poor as the journalists are trying to imply) they probably just let the raw sewage overflow across the border into Palestinian villages. Oh wait, that's a different country. In Dubai (assuming the story was true), it would be anywhere that rich people who live in the Burj Khalifa don't have to think about it. – user253751 Aug 16 '21 at 14:21
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    @DavidHammen that might not be true. Large facilities will cost significantly more to connect to a network. It’s entirely plausible that the sewerage system would have had to be upgraded to handle the building. As an example, data centres which consume large amounts of electricity will sometimes pay for the cost of the (new / upgraded) substation(s) they connect to. – Tim Aug 17 '21 at 08:44
  • Got it's start in the book or from a misinterpretation of statements in the interview? You say one and then appear to imply the other. – Scooter Nov 07 '21 at 16:15
  • @Scooter It's hard to tell which is which. Kate Ascher wrote a book about skyscrapers in general in 2011, and so of course she had to include a section on the Burj Khalafa. That Ascher may have gotten the facts wrong is irrelevant. Whether Ascher should have got the facts right also is irrelevant. It happens. The NPR Fresh Air interview did imply that that was Ascher's claim, but that was a book review. Better journalism would have poked at that claim. The follow-on articles from BoingBoing, Gizmodo, etc. absolutely should have poked rather than playing journalism cytogenesis. – David Hammen Nov 07 '21 at 17:21
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All statements seem to be true to some extent:

  1. The City did and still does have a sewer system and at least one major plant to treat it
  2. There has been outage at the plant at some point but such outages are temporary
  3. The plants (large and small) did not have sufficient capacity to treat the output of the city for a long period of time even when working without issues (which is still the case in 2021)
  4. The processing plants will have sufficient capacity to treat all the output by 2025 in theory thanks to new major investments
  5. The Burj Khalifa HAS access to the sewer system
  6. Due to the processing plant not being able to handle the load AND the Burj Khalifa as well as other new buildings going live, some parts of the system seemed to have been disconnected from the processing plant and the trucks introduced to take the excess output into another plant which also filled up its capacity though hence the long line of trucks. NOTE: poop is not stated to be transported from such buildings directly via trucks but instead parts of the network seem to have been disconnected (or not connected at all to a processing plant) and pumps used in several locations to get the output into the trucks.
  7. It is not explicitly stated if the Burj Khalifa output is ending up on the trucks but since it was one of the major contributors of the overload it can be assumed with relatively high certainty that it has been so for several years. Still it would be possible that the building has been connected to the plant at the expense of other existing buildings, or the plant getting smaller updates to its capacity allowing this particular building to be connected shortly after going live

This the assumption of the particular building not being connected directly to a plant and its output being trucked away seems to be have been likely correct but not explicitly confirmed and might have also changed at any time after the building has gone live

A lot of these statements are confirmed in the Wikipedia page itself. This video seems like a good summary with further links to sources:

Glorfindel
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Jane
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