A woman’s Australian road trip turned into quite the poop-filled adventure after a pit toilet collapsed on her, getting her stuck waist-deep for hours in the Australian outback.
According to the BBC, the woman was in the sewage pit for around three hours until a local tradesman who happened to be passing by managed to help her out. The woman was on the way home to Canberra after visiting relatives in Darwin, traveling with her husband and two children.
They stopped for a toilet break in the Henbury Meteorites Conservation Zone, about 90 miles south-west of the town of Alice Springs. Given that this is practically in the middle of Australia’s outback, there is little else closer to the location than Alice Springs.
The woman’s husband was able to get the attention of the tradesman who then lowered a rope into the pit for the woman to hang on to, using his car to lift her out. The entire extraction process took over 45 minutes. Once removed from the toilet the woman was brought to a hospital, but she did not suffer any serious injuries.
Pit toilets are common in remote or rural areas throughout Australia and around the world, like off-grid camping sites. They are non-flushing toilets that collect human waste in a deep hole in the ground. According to the Facebook page Action for Alice 2020, the toilet was full of human waste and used diapers.
The BBC reports that this is not the first time a pit toilet accident has occurred in Australia. In July 2024, a pit toilet was pulled apart by firefighters in Indigo Valley in the state of Victoria after a man got stuck in it. In 2012, a 65-year-old woman fell back-first into a pit toilet in central Queensland, fracturing her leg and requiring an airlift to the hospital.
