Thames Water spending £1m a month unblocking 'fatbergs' from London's sewers

An enormous fatberg discovered in a Whitechapel sewer weighed the same as 11 double-decker buses
Tom Powell4 October 2017

Thames Water has revealed it spends £1m a month clearing blockages from London’s sewers - nearly five an hour.

The company is monitoring five giant fatbergs underneath the capital with the biggest, weighing 130 tonnes, in Tower Hamlets.

But data seen by the Standard also shows a sharp rise in ordinary blockages caused by non-flushable items such as fat, wet wipes and sanitary products in some boroughs.

Tower Hamlets has seen the biggest rise in 2016-17 at 31 per cent, but blockages in Richmond and Newham have also gone up by 21 per cent and 20 per cent respectively.

A 26-tonne fatberg covers an 1852-built sewer beneath Chinatown in central London
AP

However, London overall has witnessed a downward trend in blockages. Thames Water was called out to 41,878 blockages across London last year, 7 per cent fewer than in 2014-15.

The boroughs with the fewest blockages were the City of London, Kensington and Chelsea and Westminster.

The average diameter of a domestic sewer pipe is about the same as a cricket ball. It can become easily clogged with wipes, nappies, sanitary towels and lumps of solidified fat, Thames Water warned.

Pat Lavender, who heads up Thames Water’s fatberg fighting campaign, said: “It’s great to see that in some areas the number of blockages caused by fat and non-flushable items like wipes are decreasing, but at the same time worrying that in other parts of London they’re on the rise.

“We record every blockage we clear and use that data to directly target customers in the worst offending areas with our ‘Bin it – don’t block it’ campaign which not only explains the impact of putting the wrong things down the sink and toilet, but also what should be done instead.”

In September, a 250 metre-long solid mass of wet wipes, nappies, fat and oil weighing the same as 11 double-decker buses was discovered in Whitechapel.

Thames Water engineers say it would take them three weeks to remove the berg, which wa blocking a stretch of Victorian sewer more than twice the length of two Wembley football pitches.

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