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Providing Toilets for 39,000 Runners

By Sunday, there will be 1,660 temporary toilets set up at Ft. Wadsworth, on Staten Island, near the Verrazano-Narrows Bridge.Credit...Librado Romero/The New York Times

Before marathoners from around the world converge on New York City, an army of 2,250 boxy, 7-foot soldiers is deployed from bases throughout the Northeast.

They are the silent type, at least until their doors bang shut, as they always do. And they are pleasantly fragrant, for now, thanks to the five gallons of blue liquid in their tummies. A few, unanchored by the 50 gallons of waste they can hold, tipped over in Tuesday’s wind.

The best of the green ones, the 300 that can blend into the scenery as much as a portable toilet can, will be stationed near the Central Park finish line of Sunday’s New York City Marathon. About the same number will be sprinkled along the course at one-mile intervals, out of view of television cameras.

But most of the toilets are already in formation at the west end of the Verrazano-Narrows Bridge. By Sunday there will be 1,660 of them. Their mismatched colors create a snaking kaleidoscope through the parking lots and roadways of leafy Fort Wadsworth. “My guys are a little color blind,” said Bill Malone, president of A Royal Flush, the Connecticut-based company that has supplied portable toilets to the marathon the last 15 years. He looked at a string of green, blue, gray, brown and pink toilets.

“You’d think they could keep the grays together,” Malone said, smiling.

Staten Island represents the starting point of the New York City Marathon. It is where 39,000 participants — people who tend to be well-nourished, quite hydrated and a wee bit nervous — wait for the race to begin.

And wait.

And wait.

And, come to think of it, if you will excuse them for a moment, they will be right back.

Gathering and placing 2,250 portable toilets for a one-day event — and then removing them almost immediately — is a daunting task. The marathon represents the third-largest annual assemblage of portable toilets in the country, behind the Rose Bowl college football game and parade and the motorcycle rally in Sturgis, S.D. Placed side by side, the 4-foot-wide toilets would stretch 1.7 miles.

But race organizers know exactly where they want them, and Malone knows just how to get them there.

He is a can-do person. And, yes, he has heard every sophomoric attempt at potty humor.

“It’s not a glamorous business,” Malone said.

He pointed to the grassy slope next to the bridge where, until a couple of years ago, the so-called “world’s longest urinal” was annually assembled. It was a 290-foot open trough, hardly gender-neutral, where gravity and large holding tanks did the work.

But race organizers always thought the trough was a tad disgusting, so in its place is a strip of 122 “portable restrooms,” the industry’s preferred term. If the toilets did not block access to the bushes beyond the grassy slope, racers probably would just use the bushes.

After all, marathoners are not known for shyness. Many feel the urge and stop on the bridge soon after crossing the starting line. There are no toilets on the bridge, so they just move to the edge.

“We don’t encourage that,” said Peter Ciaccia, the race’s technical director. “Especially on a windy day.”

When Paula Radcliffe, last year’s New York City Marathon winner, was on her way to winning the 2005 London Marathon, she suddenly stopped at the edge of the course and went to the bathroom, without a bathroom. She apologized later for the “embarrassing necessity,” but it may stand as the most memorable moment in that race’s history.

Technically, going to the bathroom in public is both an illegal act in New York City and a disqualifiable one in the marathon. But no one has been booted for doing it during the race, Ciaccia said. Shop owners along the course perennially complain about racers brazenly relieving themselves, and racers routinely put “more toilets” at the top of their postrace critiques. So toilets are added, at a recent clip of about 200 a year.

A Royal Flush owns about 8,000 toilets, scattered across the region. The year’s toughest trick is bringing so many of them together for a day.

Many portable toilets are used seasonally, at festivals, parks and so on. Come fall, A Royal Flush begins bringing toilets home to one of its five facilities, including one in the Bronx.

(The average special-event life of a portable toilet, Malone said, is two years — shorter if it attends a lot of concerts — before it is assigned to duty at construction sites, the “bread and butter” of the business. Last year, A Royal Flush’s toilets at the Preakness Stakes came back with dented roofs courtesy of people running across the top of them, dodging beer cans thrown by others. The “running of the urinals” became a YouTube favorite, and banks of 10 toilets were divided this year by 15-foot gaps. Sadly, if comically, some tried to make the leap. Marathoners are much less wild — “You don’t get anybody writing graffiti,” Malone said — if no less filled with liquid.)

The toilets are cleaned and loaded onto trucks and trailers that hold up to 28 units. Each unit weighs 200 pounds when empty, but up to 600 pounds when full. Getting them to Fort Wadsworth is expensive; the toll for a six-axel truck on the Verrazano-Narrows Bridge, for example, is $48 with an E-Z Pass, and $64 without one.

Toilets start flowing to Staten Island on Oct. 1. By Monday night, 1,321 of the 1,660 were in place (each is tagged with a sensor and tracked easily), including 250 from a friendly competitor in New Jersey called Johnny on the Spot. More truckloads arrived each night. Beginning on Thursday, the units were inspected, supplied with toilet paper (14,000 rolls total) and tied shut, to be reopened before dawn on Sunday. There is a similar process for the toilets at Central Park.

The toilets destined for the course itself are held at A Royal Flush’s Bronx facility. They start getting placed on Friday night. Crews drive the route early Sunday to ensure that everything is in place.

As soon as the last racer crosses the starting line, the clean-up begins. At Fort Wadsworth, a 16,000-gallon tanker, two 4,000-gallon tankers and several 1,500-gallon ones suck the toilets relatively clean. By Monday morning, the toilets are either gone or awaiting pick-up in an out-of-the-way parking lot. The toilets on the course are gone by Monday morning, too.

“They start smelling,” Malone admitted. “And people are like, ‘Get these things out of here.’ ”

A version of this article appears in print on  , Section D, Page 1 of the New York edition with the headline: 39,000 Runners, Many Looking For a Restroom. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe

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