Pulled from London’s sewers this week, this giant ball off food fat and other waste is the size of a double decker bus.
We have a ‘new word of the year winner; fatberg. It means a massive ball of fat, like an iceberg only instead of frozen water you have congealed food gunk. Lovely.
Folks in south west London were having trouble with their toilets so the maintenance crews went down for a look. What they found was pretty grim; a 15-tonne ball of fat.
The video below shows what Thames Water found when they went looking for the problem, and you can clearly see the fat sticking to the walls of the sewer before they get to the big blockage, the fatberg, at about 2.20 in the below video.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R5ayo54J_u0
The BBC carries some extraordinary quotes from those who worked on the problem.
“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 this big clogging our sewers before,” said Thames Water’s waste contracts supervisor Gordon Hailwood.
“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.
“The sewer was almost completely clogged with over 15 tonnes of fat. If we hadn’t discovered it in time, raw sewage could have started spurting out of manholes across the whole of Kingston.”
As for the fate of the fatberg after being hauled to the surface, it will have the water extracted from it and the remaining fat and oil will be used for things like soap and fuel.
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