Mr. Floatie!Flipping through the latest issue of Utne Reader, something caught my eye: a photo of a seven-foot tall...er, um...turd (with a sailor hat!).

Meet the one and only Mr. Floatie, described in the brief article as the brainchild of People Opposed to Outfall Pollution.

This Canadian group - POOP - is using Mr. Floatie in its fight to stop the city of Victoria, British Columbia from dumping more than 34 million gallons of raw sewage into the ecologically fragile Strait of Jaun de Fuca. (Yikes, shouldn't that be Jaun de Feces?)

This walking, talking, "turd-tastic" mascot was designed to publicly embarrass elected officials. And after years of unsuccessful lobbying and lawsuits, Mr. Floatie's efforts are starting to pay off. The BC Ministry of the Environment recently ordered the city to clean up its act and stop dumping raw sewage by June 2007.

Too bad Mr. Floatie got dumped in the mayor's race!

Now on to the sewage Spills O' the Week:

I prefer grease lighting: Cooking grease clogged a sanitary sewer pipe, causing an overflow of about 150 gallons of raw sewage into Rock Creek, in Montgomery County, Maryland. Improper disposal of cooking grease is a major cause of sewage spills around the country.

-ABC 7 News, December 25, 2006

Talk about raw power: A power surge knocked out sewage treatment pumps in Iowa, causing about 40,000 gallons of untreated sewage to flow into the Little Rock River.

-Siouxcityjournal.com, December 25, 2006

Port-O-Potty: Over 40,000 gallons of untreated waste flowed into Port Washington Narrows after heavy rains. Local health officials issued a no contact warning for the waters. This was the fourth overflow at Station 11 in little more than a month.

-Kitsapsun.com, December 27, 2006

Make that a brownbelt: Vandals stuffed large rocks into manholes, causing more than 60,000 gallons of sewage to back up into an Austin creek, closing a nearby greenbelt trail while crews cleaned up the spill.

-KEYE TV, December 27, 2006

Forty year flood: Waste and toilet paper flowed through the streets and onto the lawns of houses near a malfunctioning pumping station in Port St. Lucie, Florida. The 40 year-old station regularly fails after heavy rains or above average flows of domestic sewage into the sewer system.

-PalmBeachPost.com, December 28, 2006