People, please don’t pour any more grease down the sink. Really, is it so hard to tilt the fry pan and dribble the stuff with its meaty little chunks into an empty container and freeze it so you can throw it away? Or pour it over the dog food? Because let me tell you what happens when we all dump sticky stuff down the drain, night after night, meal after meal.
Fatbergs. Fatbergs happen.
I hadn’t heard of a fatberg until a recent BBC report led me to read up on the subject. The term—which sounds almost elegant with a British accent, as most words do—was unknown to me, but intriguing. My initial thoughts: Must be a very fleshy lower-body part or else a very unfortunate Jewish last name. One or the other.
But it turns out a fatberg—the word used by Thames Water in London and others across the ocean—is a monster that lives in the sewer, a sort of Jabba the Hut spreading out under city streets and clogging up the works.
Fatbergs are congealed fat, mostly. But like concrete that’s roughed up with rebar for strength, a fatberg is wormed through with other materials, like hair, and used toilet paper, and baby wipes (lots of baby wipes), and tampons, and pretty much every other disgusting non-biodegradable thing we humans flush or rinse away each day. It’s a gooey, reeking mass that turns a sewer system into a stopped up intestinal tract, coated and clogged by people’s bad decisions.
Now and then city officials have to wrestle one of these things out of the ground, with power washers and shovels. I hope those people get paid well. Sometimes they find extra-weird stuff stuck in the goo. A ‘berg in Belfast housed a Christmas tree and a live kitten. Another juicy fatberg was reportedly nourishing a family of frogs.
