Return of the fatberg: 40-metre mass of grease and wet-wipes removed from London sewer
You can run but you can’t hide … or flush your toilet.
Yes, it’s the return of the fatberg, a monstrous blob of congealed fat, waste, and wet-wipes coming soon to a sewer near you. Especially if you happen to live in west London.
This week’s culprit is a 40-metre bruiser removed from under the leafy streets of Chelsea and weighing as much as five Porsches. The latest fatberg was so big it broke a 70-year-old sewer pipe, leaving Thames Water with a GBP400,000 (HK$4.6 million) repair bill.
WATCH: Britain's largest "fatberg", found in 2013
It wasn’t even the area’s worst. In 2013, “Britain’s biggest berg”, weighing 15 tonnes and as long as a double-decker bus, was found in Kingston upon Thames, and last year a fatberg the size of a Boeing 747 was discovered under the streets of Shepherd’s Bush. It’s only a matter of time before a fatberg as mighty as the Titanic herself bursts out of the manholes on High Street Kensington.
“It’s definitely getting worse,” says Craig Rance, a campaigns executive at Thames Water.
“We’re seeing a rise in the number of wipes being flushed down the toilet as people move away from toilet paper. And only one in 10 know how their drains work.
“People think the toilet is some magic portal that makes everything disappear, but it all has to go somewhere.”
And why posh west London?
“There is a high density of people, a lot of food outlets, and [it’s] a place where just getting rid of the rubbish is the main issue,” is his rather diplomatic answer.
A fatberg, he notes, “smells like the worst wet dog you’ve ever encountered” and the bigger the sewer, the bigger the hound.
“The sewer from Leicester Square through Whitehall is about two metres high and several metres wide and it can become completely clogged with fatbergs,” he says.
“Three years ago our guys spent three weeks digging out one fatberg that was threatening to flood the whole of Leicester Square."
There doesn’t seem to be a city in the western world without its very own plague, however. Earlier this year metre-wide mass, largely constructed out of takeaway grease, was found under one of Cardiff’s busiest streets, and in Scotland it’s thought fatbergs are to blame for more than 40,000 blockages.
Clearing “backups” caused by grease in New York City cost an estimated US$4.65 million (HK$36 million) in 2013, though the Washington Post points out only London has thought to give the phenomenon “such a dubiously affectionate name”.
And in Melbourne last year a buildup “of epic proportions” was found in the sewerage system, prompting a Yarra Valley Water spokesman to warn its citizens: “We all know where number ones and number twos should go, but there is no such thing as a number three, so please do not put anything else down the drain.”
If only someone would tell west Londoners.
