So There Was A 15-Tonne Mountain Of Fat, Grease And Wet Wipes Clogging Up A London Sewer All Weekend
The biggest "fatberg" that Britain has ever seen.
Have you finished lunch? Good. Because a 15-tonne lump of rotting food, fat and sanitary wipes took up residency within the drains of a South London road this weekend, so gigantic and disgusting that the local water authority are dubbing it Britain’s largest ever “fatberg”.
This CCTV still seems to be the only image available of the fatberg in all of its thick, viscous glory.
The revolting bulk of grease is the size of a bus, and was discovered after nearby residents registered complaints of toilet blockage.
“While we’ve removed greater volumes of fat from under central London in the past, we’ve never seen a single, congealed lump of lard clogging our sewers before,” said Gordon Hailwood, the waste contracts supervisor for Thames Water.
Other choice quotes from Gordon Hailwood include “Given we’ve got the biggest sewers and this is the biggest fatberg we’ve encountered, we reckon it has to be the biggest such berg in British history” and “If we hadn’t discovered it in time, raw sewage could have started spurting out of manholes across the whole of Kingston.”
The fatberg reduced the 70x48cm sewer to just 5% of its normal capacity, and required the help of an eight-member team of waste experts who have made extremely questionable career choices, according to NBC, “used shovels and jets of water to dislodge the pulpy aggregation of cooking fat and flushed wet wipes”.
The clean-up — a stealth operation conducted under the cover of darkness — lasted three nights, with the dislodged fatberg chopped up into chunks and carted off to a nearby landfill that we don’t want to visit ever.
“Kill me. Kill me. Kill me.”
The development comes a few months after Thames Water announced they’d been spending around £1 million each month unblocking clogged sewers. The water authority signed a £200m deal with a power company, who will be burning the fatbergs of London to generate enough energy to power 39,000 homes, with 75 Gigawatt hours being sent to a nearby desalination plant and sewage works.
In related news, “don’t be such a fatberg” is a new thing you can say.