Aw, bad day at your air-conditioned, somewhat clean desk? Try shifting a 40-tonne fatberg Workers at Thames Water have shifted a 40-tonne fatberg – slightly more than three double-decker buses – from a sewer in south London. For the uninitiated, fatbergs are the glossy miracles that occur when fat, grease and oil meet wet wipes and nappies to congeal into an impenetrable lump of sewer-based deliciousness. Thames …
Apart from Parliament --- proudly claiming the soubriquet of The Greatest Fatburg --- does the government have a list of fatburgs in Great Britain ?
And do they occur greatly in other countries ?
And I'm not advocating executions in the early 19th century fashion, in the street where the offence occurred, and the fat went into the drain, but it couldn't hurt.
"The other thought is you Brits have a different quality of fat ..."
I gather that in some city centres there are a lot of restaurants which serve fried food. Although there are collection services for old fat (even free of charge) some folk seem to find it easier to pour the stuff down the drain. That should be intercepted by their grease interceptors but it seems that these are either missing or defective. I've heard that the traps are not usually inspected, to relieve the regulatory burden on restaurants, but creating lots of problems downstream. Seems to be a fairly specific UK problem, haven't heard of this happening in, say, NL. Though here wet wipes seem to be causing problems (in blocks of flats, not so much the main sewers).
I really can't understand why some folk flush inappropriate stuff down the drain but that probably just means I'm an unimaginative, grumpy git. Wish the magistrates could impose community service orders on these restaurant operators requiring them to help remove the fatbergs!
As regards fat traps, at work ours is supposed to convert the fat using some kind of enzyme which is dosed into the trap by a small pump. It then becomes safe for the sewer. A previous head of the cafe didn't like the price of this stuff so stopped buying it. The grease trap - about the size of a chest freezer - simply clogged up and had to be dug out by hand, with spades.
In general though, small quantities of fat shouldn't be a problem for most sewers. Where it does become an issue is when that fat gets caught up with the stupid inappropriate items which are also in the drains - the wet wipes, cotton buds, sanitary products etc. - and then get caught at a bend or on a root or something.
Nappies? How can anyone flush a nappy? It would block most normal loos, never mind a sewer! Maybe they mean nappy liners, though these days most of them claim to be safe to flush I think.
M.
No they happen in the US as well. You also have to remember, many of the sewers, especially in London were built with populations far smaller in mind that now.
Many issues could be easily solved by banning wipes that don't degrade in a typical flush.
As I told a soon to be dad, if it's made by Johnson and Johnson, you probably don't need it.
Many issues could be easily solved by banning wipes that don't degrade in a typical flush.Which, AFAIK, is all of them that don't degrade appropriately.
Any 'flushable wipe' is determined to be flushable by the wipe-manufacturing industries own self-set standards, not standards set/approved/tested by the sewage/engineering/maintenance industry.
"And do they occur greatly in other countries"
My understanding (limited but I did used to do h&s software for utility companies relating to sewer management) is that they occur much more frequently in older sewer systems.
London sewers date back to the 1800s lots of them are still made of bricks giving the wetwipes and fat a nice textured surface to cling onto.
Many sources, such as this one, describe fatbergs in countries other than the UK.
Besides the flushing of fats and non-disintegrating wipes, some major contributing factors appear to be the percentage of sewer capacity in use, roughness of sewer lines, and amount of calcium in the water (due to source hardness, calcium leaching from concrete, etc). The calcium reacts with saponified fats to form soap scale, just as it does in the shower, for example.
Question:
Why is it not viable to fit a mesh over sewer pipes that enter the sewers so that things like wet-wipes and nappies block up the local sewer / that person's drain rather than get washed downstream into a big globule that affects half a city?
Surely those pipes just feed into other pipes which feed into larger pipes which feed into sewers... start mandating and fitting a grille inside them just outside the customer's pipework so they can only block up their own / their neighbour's damn sewer when they flush something unflushable.
Presumably you'd still end up with the same problem as now, but you'd simply be moving it up stream. So rather than one 40-tonne fatberg in one location, you'd have say 40 1-tonne fatbergs, all of which need individually removing, but which are all in smaller less accessible pipes so harder to work in.
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In China, fat from sewers and traps is illicitly scooped, cleaned up—though not well—and sold on the black market as “gutter oil.” In cheap restaurants and street stalls, your dinner might even be cooked in gutter oil.
https://www.nationalgeographic.com/news/2017/08/fatbergs-fat-cities-sewers-wet-wipes-science/
And in America the name is FOG. Fat, Oil and Grease.
How long before this sort of thing happens in the Cloud?
I propose this eventuality be called an NTFS Berg. (Aha funnily enough I see there is an IoT device being developed by a company called Berg). IoT arguably pumping a lot of waste packets through the intertubes...
So yes, I've just convinced myself that NTFS Berg's will be the next big thing, made up of data and packets.
So keep your data local folks to prevent an NTFS Berg.
One of my friends used to work for a company that contracted for the sewage side of things at one of the water companies in England. He used to have regular vaccinations (and I think tests) for things like Hepatitis (plus others) due to the risk of infection from being so close to sewage. He was glad to get away from that crap.
There is, unfortunately, no mindlessness about it. When using high pressure water jetting equipment that can be over 2000psi you have to be alert to every potential problem. You must be wearing face protection and maybe have an air supply all of which obscures vision. Then there is the omnipresent danger of lethal gases and the chance of falling in! Oh did I forget to mention the smell? Shit is pleasant compared to fat.
Seriously, its not fun.
If journalists insist on describing objects in terms of double decker buses or ...
Not just journalists. A while ago I went to a talk by a retired drains engineer. He said that before the days of mobiles, all of them had to carry around an old penny or two for the phone boxes. When they investigated holes opening up in roads, they'd have to estimate it's size to report back to the office. They used units of DDBs - Double Decker Busses - as something that was fairly easy to visualise.
So not a new unit.
The Brisbane fatbergs are described by Australians as the size of a Plane; 747s to be precise.
https://www.stuff.co.nz/world/australia/87669859/brisbanes-planeized-fatbergs-and-how-were-making-them-worse
In Michigan USA they compare theirs to Blue Whales; the Baltimore USA fatberg was merely compared to an Iceberg. However, worse than Britain that one sent 250 gallons of raw sewage onto the streets.
https://www.baltimorebrew.com/2017/10/16/what-was-lurking-beneath-charles-street-a-colossal-fatberg/
.
Then again, why 'RAW' ?
@Claverhouse - "Then again, why 'RAW' ?"
Because it only gets cooked after arriving at your local [insert hated fast-food join].
Seriously, sewage treatment eliminates the most dangerous pathogens and contaminants, and separates it into solids (can be used as fertiliser) and liquid safe enough to return to the environment. The stuff before treatment is raw.
Well, Australia was meant to be the "lynchpin" to ban (or limit) flushable wipes. Unfortunately, the government was (easily) trounced by Kimberly-Clark.
Way back at the dawn of history, when I first got out of college, I worked for a market research firm that did research on real-time control systems, like SCADA. We had a nice practice in research on SCADA and process control systems used in the water/wastewater utility industries. One of the wastewater utilities that we talked to every years had a superintendent as our main contact about their control system purchasing plans and needs, and that gentleman was named Gordon Catchpool.
I still remember Mr. Catchpool, very nearly 30 years later.
Having cleared a mini-fatberg about the size of three or four cricket balls from my drain the other day I find all this 'wipes' blaming interesting.
As a human with half a grain of common sense, our house *never* sees wipes of any sort. The drain in question has a fat trap (most don't nowadays) but we use very little fat/grease/oil and the drain is only fed from the kitchen.
The obvious conclusion being that neither wipes or logs that were bendy enough to avoid the bread knife were responsible ...
The only sources of the hard, almost brittle material in the 'berg are the 'sludge' in cans that we're encouraged to wash out, soap, limescale, dishwasher and washing machine waste and the little 'fat' we use directly. If it's made of simple fats, I do wonder why the hot dishwasher/washing machine waste doesn't dissolve and clear it on the way through ...
I also had to clear out a mini-berg from our system (on path to septic tank), only about 45cm long, pipe shaped with a hole down the middle (like pipe lagging). Interestingly, I did find one wet wipe under the manhole with the berg.
Having to do it does give a greater appreciation for the guys who deal with the big ones.
ps. Wear gloves, and careful with the jet wash. You don't want splash back.
....in the same way that worms compost kitchen waste.
Quite by chance I was at a motorway services* the other day and saw quite a few of these. Alas regulatory approval would preclude these particular specimens from use in this case.
*Alternative locations for concentrations of such lifeforms abound.
What you're thinking of already exists and is commonly in use. It's known as a lift station. These are used sometimes to pump sewerage from a lower elevation to a higher elevation. They're also used to pump sewerage from a gravity-fed (no pressure) sewer system into a pressurized "forced" sewer main line (as is common here in Florida). These incorporate a wet-well chamber into which the incoming sewerage is fed, and then a pump and grinder system pumps the macerated sewerage into the outgoing line.
I'm guessing this could break up some of the softer materials. However, this would be quite costly to retrofit into an existing large sewer system, and it would increase the amount of equipment that would need to be regularly maintained and monitored by the sanitary sewer service. For a city the size of London, that would be a rather large undertaking.
Additionally, this might change the situation into problems with a multitude of individual "fatbergs" in the lift station wet wells and/or trunk lines leading to the lift stations, rather than one or two "fatbergs" in the main trunk lines of the sewer system. Also, the macerated fats and cooking oils leaving the lift stations might still be capable of congealing into the "fatberg" material, which seems to be the result of a chemical reaction (calcification of lipids from reactions with alkaline liquids).
Please tell me I am not the only one who visualised these as the Stay Puft Marshmallow man from Ghostbusters? Can we use 1 Stay Puft as the standard unit of measurement for Fatbergs?
Based on Wikipedia, he is 34.3m tall (I thought he would be taller) and I estimate based my highly scientific approach of holding a ruler up against the picture on my screen that he is around 19.5m wide at his widest. If he follows the UK/US average body sizes I believe he will have a ratio of 1:1.41 depth to width. Therefore he is likely to be 13.8m deep, presuming he follows the ratio consistently and acknowledging he is not likely to be as restricted by musculoskeletal requirements as you and I.
So based on a total potential volume of 9230 cubic metres, I have at a wild guess assumed that his only fills 60% of that cube due to his shape which leaves 5538 cubic metres.
For the instances noted that would give us the following (supposedly 1 cubic metre of beef tallow fat weighs 865kg)
- London would be roughly 46 cubic metres (does anyone know what it actually was in volume?) which is only 0.0083 of a Stay Puft Marshmallow Man (SPMM).
- Whitechapel would be roughly 150 cubic metres (which based on a length of 250m might be close). That would be 0.027 SPMM.
- Devon (using El Reg's prior estimate of 34 tonnes, based only on length, not volume) would be roughly 39 cubic metres or 0.0070 SPMM
Hmm that worked out less than I was hoping, I will have to introduce Inflatable Model Stay Puft Marshmallow Man (IMSPMM) to make the standard measurement easier for the layman to use. Anyone willing to measure volume of one ;-)
Anon or I would have to admit how much work time I now have to make up....
"Thames Water has visited local food establishments to ensure their fat traps are working properly."
Betcha they paid some plonkers to walk in, demand a free curry, check off a box on a clip board, and walk out again. They're in this situation because their bean counters won't let them employ proper inspectors.
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