USA Today-New York: You may not have been the only one who held it in during Bad Bunny’s Super Bowl performance.

The Puerto Rican artist’s 13-minute halftime show on Feb. 8 captivated audiences for one of the most watched Super Bowls in history. Some data suggests people skipped going to the bathroom when Bad Bunny, whose real name is Benito Antonio Martínez Ocasio, started his set.

In New York City, memorialized in Bad Bunny’s hit “NUEVAYoL,” officials said residents in the nation’s largest city appeared to hold off going to the bathroom until after his performance.

“NYC saw a significant reduction in water usage throughout the five boroughs during the Super Bowl’s #BadBunny halftime show yesterday,” the city Department of Environmental Protection said in a viral Feb. 9 X post, “but in the 15 minutes right after the show ended, there was a spike in usage equivalent to 761,719 toilets flushing across town.”

New Yorkers also used the toilet in record numbers, including around when the actual football game resumed after halftime. That may point to how large the audience was in the five boroughs, which is the city with the largest population of Latinos, including Puerto Ricans, in the country.

The toilet flushes during this Super Bowl increased by nearly 300,000 from the previous year, said Déja Stewart, a department spokesperson.

Despite the surge in flushing, increased demand didn’t strain or negatively affect the city’s wastewater or sewer systems, Stewart said in a Feb. 10 email. That’s because flushes are spread out and not condensed in one area.

Even so, Stewart added, every Super Bowl has dramatic, predictable increases in water demand at three key moments: the start of the halftime show, the end of the halftime show, and the game's end. Daily usage also has similar rhythms. For example, demand decreases when people sleep, and increases as they begin morning routines.

“Super Bowl Sunday simply compresses those natural peaks into a few dramatic moments tied to the broadcast,” Stewart wrote.

Still, other major municipal wastewater agencies told USA TODAY they didn't observe the same pattern, with a drop in flushes at halftime, then followed by a surge.

The Metropolitan Water Reclamation District of Greater Chicago’s seven water reclamation plants don’t typically see a huge spike in treatment volumes at any point on Super Bowl Sunday because its basins are so large, according to Patrick Thomas, an agency spokesperson.

In South Florida, the Miami-Dade County Water and Sewer Department staff reviewed water pressure data and determined there were “no discernible changes to water pressures before, during and after the Super Bowl Halftime show,” agency spokesperson Jennifer L. Messemer-Skold said in an email.

(Officials in Seattle and Boston, serving the respective fan bases of the Seahawks and the Patriots, didn't respond to USA TODAY's email requests.)

On Bad Bunny’s home island of Puerto Rico, it’s harder to gauge toilet flushes.

The Puerto Rico Aqueduct and Sewer Authority's measurement systems and mechanical meters don’t allow officials to accurately determine water consumption over short periods, according to Gian Paul Luciano Ramos, the authority's spokesperson. Its metrics can’t confirm specific variations in toilet usage during a single event, Luciano Ramos said in an email.

For that reason, there's no way to tell how the performance of the island's native son played out in their bathroom patterns.

Bad Bunny and others have frequently criticized the reliability of the United States' territory's utilities compared to the mainland. His Super Bowl performance even included exploding electric poles, a nod to the island's documented issues with its privatized energy grid.

View Article