A backed-up sewer resulted in a shitty situation in the UK town of Bishopric, Horsham leading utility company Southern Water to call in their crack team of professional blockage busters. What they found was a fatberg of monstrous proportions—a 100-pound abomination of cooking oil, grease diapers, sanitary napkins, and other non-biodegradable detritus that coagulated into an unholy mass of pipe-blocking grossness.
"Sewer blockages caused by wetwipes and other unflushables like sanitary products and nappies combined with fat, oil and grease from home cooking or food establishments are all too common," said Sussex Area sewer network manager Roger Williams in a statement. "Fatbergs are the number one cause of pollution in our area. Forunately, we arrived in time to destroy this monster."
The team used powerful hydro jets to attack the fatberg and then industrial tools to extract it from the sewer. "Without the intervention the fatberg could have caused manholes to overflow and homes and businesses to flood or even led to pollution in nearby water courses," the utility company reports.
Williams suspects that the fatberg was likely born from kitchen waste improperly dumped down the drain by one or more food businesses in the area. Fortunately, AI is emerging as a new weapon in the battle against fatbergs.
"The addition of more than 20000 artifical intelligence monitors which detect when sewers in blockage 'hotspots' are backing up is changing the game and enabling us to get to far more blockages before the problem turns into a crisis," Williams says. "But with 40,000km of sewers, it's absolutely vital that people understand not to put the wring things down loos or sinks."
Previously:
• 64-meter fatberg lurks beneath English seaside resort
• 'Disgusting' fatberg removed from London sewer
