Usually at Odd News, we like to riff on mainstream news events, but starting Monday, we began seeing one pop up that didn’t pass the smell test.
Multiple stories appeared in the news cycle claiming that the USS Gerald Ford’s shitters were broken; however, none were recent reports from reputable news outlets. Except one. And it wasn’t even the focus of that article.
Here’s what actually happened and how this story escaped into the wild again.
Stop the Slop! (MC1 Nathan T. Beard/Navy)
In mid-January, NPR’s Steve Walsh published a genuine investigative piece about chronic failures in the Ford’s Vacuum Collection, Holding, and Transfer system. This would be the vacuum-powered sewage network borrowed, with what now appears to be excess optimism, from the cruise ship industry. Walsh obtained internal Navy emails documenting 205 breakdowns in four days, maintenance techs working 19-hour shifts, and an engineering department that had fished everything from T-shirts to a four-foot piece of rope out of the pipes. The NPR story was real, well-sourced, and described a legitimate design flaw that the Government Accountability Office had flagged in 2020, six years before most of the internet discovered it existed.
Navy Times followed up a week later with an official Navy response confirming the problems were chronic but manageable, averaging about one maintenance call per day. Which is a toilet-breakdown rate your local high school or dive-bar could only dream of.
Then on February 21, the Wall Street Journal published “Missed Funerals and Blocked Toilets,” a 3,000-word piece about the toll of the Ford’s extended deployment on sailor morale. Sailors have missed their kids’ birthdays. A sailor missed his great-grandfather’s death. A sailor is thinking about leaving the Navy because she hasn’t seen her toddler in eight months. It was a serious piece about the real human cost.
The WSJ article mentioned the plumbing situation around paragraph 20, and cited the January NPR report as context (which means nothing new happened). The WSJ also noted a detail that would prove inconvenient for the next 72 hours of internet coverage had anyone actually read the whole goddamn article: the sewage system’s performance had actually improved. One sailor’s father told the Journal his son said the problem was under control. The most grievous recent plumbing incident was that someone had thrown garbage in a toilet on the lowest deck. Not exactly the Poseidon Adventure.
On the morning of February 23, a Dubai-based outlet called Gulf News became the first to repackage the WSJ piece, slapping the word “CRISIS” onto a situation the WSJ had explicitly described as handled. Within hours, a pair of anonymous Twitter aggregator accounts had repacked the story as “BREAKING.” Next, a defense blog (re)wrote it up as a formal article. Then the Pravda network, which is a constellation of Russian-adjacent sites that operates somewhere in the near-circular Venn diagram area between bullshit farm and state messaging, jumped on the story. Interestingly, they picked up the blog’s text nearly word-for-word, which at least saved Pravda the trouble of fabricating the entire thing from scratch.
By February 24, Pravda’s many regional affiliates had published over a dozen versions of the story, each one escalating like a game of telephone played by people who want to kill you in nuclear fire someday. The Ford went from “having plumbing issues” to “flooded with feces” to experiencing a “fecal apocalypse” to having “lost combat capability” to, and note this is a real headline, “humiliatingly requesting asylum in Greece.” The ship was, in fact, in Greece. It was there for a routine resupply stop because Crete has fuel and is located between where the Ford was and where the Ford was going. But “aircraft carrier stops for fuel and snacks” is not a headline that advances anyone’s diabolical geopolitical interests, except for maybe Buc-ee’s. Buc-ee’s has denied all wrongdoing.
(India Today)
Then Indian content farms stapled the toilet angle to the Iran tensions and published rage-bait articles with headlines designed to make readers too incredulous to check both the dateline or the source material. Instagram reels appeared with AI-generated summaries of the “CRISIS”.
Then Sputnik, an official Russian news agency, put out a video tweet about 45-minute toilet lines, which was roughly the point where the story completed the journey from FOIA-backed NPR investigation to state-sponsored poop-adjacent information weapon.
Toilets are funny. Butt stuff is inherently hilarious. A $13 billion warship being brought low by a vacuum pump borrowed from a Carnival cruise liner is the kind of irony that writes its own punchline. We would love nothing more than to spend 800 words making vacuum sewage puns, and under normal circumstances, we would (and kind of did, but I digress).
But the only reason this story is in anyone’s news feed this week is that a Russian disinformation machine trying to start shit picked up a weeks-old maintenance story, stripped out every detail indicating the problem had been more or less solved, invented a series of claims about fecal apocalypses and emergency asylum requests, and is currently churning it across multiple languages in an attempt make the U.S. military look incompetent during a period of active geopolitical tension with Iran.
The Ford has real problems. Its sailors have been at sea for months, and they deserve better plumbing and a trip home. But the “USS Ford sewage crisis of February 2026” is the informational equivalent of what supposedly keeps clogging the Ford’s pipes: foreign material shoved into a system that wasn’t designed to handle it, causing everything downstream to back up, overflowing and covering everything with crap.
In conclusion, fuck Russia.
