The so-called fatberg took 4 days to remove, media reports say

Sep 2, 2014 19:55 GMT  ·  By

Not too long ago, workers with Thames Water, a private utility company entrusted with public water supply and waste water treatment in London, UK, spent four days in a row removing a lump of fat blocking sewers under the city.

Length-wise, the lump, part of which is visible in the photo accompanying this article, was about the size of a Boeing 747. It comprised not just waste fat, but also bits and pieces of food and wet wipes.

What's more, the Thames Water staff who removed it say that tennis balls and even planks of wood were embedded in it. How and why the tennis balls and the planks of wood ended up in the sewers below London remains a mystery.

According to Dave Dennis, a sewer operations manager at Thames Water, company employees are no strangers to removing such seriously oversized lumps of fat and garbage from the sewers beneath the city of London.

In fact, it often happens that these sewers become clogged with fat and trash. The way sewer operations manager Dave Dennis sees things, it's city residents who improperly dispose of cooking waste and other garbage that need be blamed for such incidents.

“Fat goes down the drain easily enough, but when it hits the cold sewers, it hardens into disgusting fatbergs that block pipes. Wet wipes cling to the fat. Fat clings to the wipes,” he said in a statement, as cited by Mirror.

“Pretty soon your fatberg is out of control and sewage is backing up into roads, gardens and in the worst cases flooding up through toilets and into homes,” the Thames water sewer operations manager went on to explain.

In order to remove this latest massive fatberg from the sewers under the city of London, company workers had to use high-powered jets of water to break it down. The fatberg fragments were then disposed of, and circulation in the sewers returned to normal.

Dave Dennis wishes to stress that, were people to start paying closer attention to what goes down their drains, incidents like this one could easily be prevented. Consequently, floods would occur less often, and company workers would have an easier time on the job.

“We have 67,108 miles [nearly 108,000 kilometers] of sewers, and that's a lot of pipe to keep clear. We spend ₤12 million (about €14 million / $20 million) a year tackling blockages, most of them formed because people have tipped cooking fats down the drain and wet wipes down the loo,” he told the press.