Fifteen-tonne 'fatberg' cloggs London's sewers
A 15-tonne mass of fat, wet wipes and sanitary products has been clogging up the sewers in London.
LONDON (Web Desk) - The ball of congealed fat - dubbed Britain s biggest ever "fatberg" - has been dredged up from a London sewer, utility company Thames Water said on Tuesday.
It took 10 days to remove the double-decker bus-sized lump of festering food fat mixed with sanitary wipes which formed in drains under a major road in Kingston, southwest London.
Local residents in the well-to-do suburb complained that their toilets would not flush.
Had the colossal "fatberg" not been removed, it could have led to raw sewage flooding homes, streets and businesses, Thames Water said.
"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," Gordon Hailwood, waste contracts supervisor for the company, said in a statement.
"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.
Images from inside the sewer showed that the rotting mound of fat had reduced the 27-inch by 19-inch drain to five per cent of its normal capacity.
