San Francisco residents were left surprised and disgusted on Saturday night by the appearance of approximately twenty pounds of human waste left dumped on a sidewalk in the city’s Tenderloin district, at the intersection of Polk and Cedar streets. Reddit user SerFuxAlot brought attention to the public hazard, on the r/sanfrancisco subreddit, having identified it from a report made on the City’s ‘Citizen’ mobile app designed for reporting crimes and other public disturbances. The report made on the app described the hazard as being twenty pounds in weight, and subsequent pictures of the disturbance posted on the reddit thread revealed a plastic bag of waste dumped on the street.

Although the odor of the waste made it a revolting nuisance to San Francisco residents, the waste remained on the public street until later that evening, despite the San Francisco Department of Public Works having been notified of the problem around mid-afternoon earlier that day by the original report on the city’s municipal mobile app. Another reddit user, Tulsi2, described the waste as smelling “like a farm or fertilizer or something. At least it was physically well-contained, but if there was ever a need for 311, this was it.”

The latest account of squalor and filth on San Francisco’s public streets isn’t the only report of serious public pollution problems in the city. A survey of downtown San Francisco’s public sanitation by the local NBC affiliate located more than 100 needles for drug use and more than 300 instances of feces(unknown to be of human or animal origin) within a relatively small area of 153 city blocks. Despite being one of the per-capita wealthiest communities in the country- and an iconic American city known as an international tourist and film destination- it seems as if San Francisco’s public sanitation has reached a point where it might more closely resemble that of a city in a third world country than that of a highly developed and wealthy nation.