Lurking in the sewer, a 130-tonne monster ‘fatberg’

A FATBERG weighing more than ten double-decker buses is blocking a sewer under a street in east London.

The 130-tonne mass of hardened cooking fat, wet wipes and nappies has clogged up a stretch of Victorian sewer under the busy Whitechapel Road.

Matt Rimmer, Thames Water’s head of waste networks, said: ‘This fatberg is up there with the biggest we’ve ever seen. It’s a total monster and taking a lot of manpower and machinery to remove as it’s set hard. It’s like trying to break up concrete.’

The fatberg is 820ft long, which is more than twice the length of the Wembley football pitch, or just under four times the length of a Boeing 747. Engineers have begun to break it down using high-powered jet hoses, pumping the waste into tankers and sending it to a nearby disposal site.

In a nine-hour shift they can remove up to 30 tonnes from the sewer which is around 4ft high and just over 2ft wide.

Thames Water said work will continue throughout September.

The company has urged customers not to flush away items such as nappies and to throw cooking oil in the bin after letting it cool and solidify. The fatberg is the latest to cause problems in the UK’s sewers.

In 2013, Thames Water said they had found a smaller ‘bus-sized’ fatberg in the sewers beneath Kingston in south-west London, which was then believed to be the biggest in Britain’s history.

That is significantly smaller than the Whitechapel Road fatberg which is the length of 22 new London Routemasters.