Tom Murphy installs the Reclamator in March 2008
The end of “The Reclamator” came not with a bang, but with a gurgle.
In mid June Tom Murphy, of “Reclamator” notoriety, was evicted from the house he had been occupying in Bayview Estates since March 2008. Compared to his grand entrance, he exited Los Osos quietly, leaving the fiberglass shell of his beloved Reclamator in the ground at the house.
Late last month Murphy was located in Lake Havasu, Arizona. His retreat appeared to mark the end—though probably not in Murphy’s mind—of his long, drawn-out campaign to sue the district and state for not embracing his water-saving onsite technology. Coincidentally, the SWRCB and RWQCB deserve to be sued for all the misery they’ve caused Los Osos with their illegal vendetta against a select group of homeowners—and Murphy initially tapped into that pre-existing community resentment toward the rogue regulators especially.
Murphy played the legal system as far as he could, but, in the end, there was no payday for him, no settlements, no get-out-of-town money coming his way. He had dug a dry well in the wrong County. He made a colossal blunder thinking a carpetbagger could just walk into SLO and rip off honestly-stolen money from thieves in suits who have been doing it here for years. Tearing a page from the Genghis Khan Scorched Earth Guide to Public Relations, Murphy strutted into Los Osos with Federal Water Code in one hand and an imaginary sword in the other, claiming to be “above the law,” spending thousands on “Vote No on Prop 218” TV ads, and swearing heads would roll.
Meanwhile, the price of the converted septic tank he called the Reclamator kept going up and up, starting at $15,000 and finishing closer to the County’s $25,000-per-home assessment for the sewer he hoped to transfer to his Reclamator; but the price changed so many times it was clear he was making it up as he went along. To combat the wall of bad PR surrounding him, Murphy offered $1,000 to anyone who could prove the Reclamator didn’t work. Never mind that he never proved it did work without a mechanic on duty, or that the RWQCB would ever permit it as an alternative to the sewer. The sands of time and opportunity were rapidly running out of Murphy’s distorted hourglass.
Now, almost two years later, he was leaving Los Osos, pulling back to the scene of an earlier lost battle in Lake Havasu. There he will add more names to the lengthening list of godless traitors he’s lining up to star in his Next Big Lawsuit. Because Tom Murphy never loses, he just moves on. After all, Los Osos isn’t the only water-challenged community in California or the U.S. There’s dirty water needing to be cleaned up almost everywhere, and Murphy can always find a small audience somewhere in the world, although the Internet is rapidly closing the window on slipping through the cracks on a shrinking planet.
Wrote Murphy in a June 27th email to his Los Osos/Morro Bay list: “Hi Guys, We made it to Lake Havasu, settled and setting up office today. By the fact the court evicted me from my residence in CA and my residence is now in AZ, the case immediately qualifies (is over $75K and now I am interstate) to be moved to the US District Court venue (in LA), which is AWESOME for us. As the result of the unjust default judgment and court ordered eviction from the RECLAMATOR house, I am adding the Judge as a defendant to my second amended complaint I will have ready to file before the middle of July, but the BIGGEST surprise I can’t let out of the bag yet. THE BEST IS YET TO COME!!! God bless you all and keep the faith, Tom.”
Murphy never had it as good as he had it in Los Osos, living free for over a year in someone else’s spacious house overlooking the Valley and Bishop’s Peak, but I doubt if he would describe it that way.
To the best of my knowledge, in all the time he was in Los Osos, Tom Murphy failed to sell a single Reclamator. And it wasn’t necessarily because the Reclamator couldn’t or wouldn’t work, because, properly managed, it could. It was because Tom Murphy was less interested in developing and marketing a revolutionary home water-management system than he was in finding the shortcut to the goldmine of overnight riches.
His strategy was simple: Why build thousands of Reclamators when you only have to build one. Just claim it produces clean water and sue anyone who says otherwise. Then try to sell them. Then sue them again.
– Ed Ochs
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