A massive, foul fatberg weighing 110 tons—roughly the heft of eight double-decker buses—has been excavated from a sewer beneath west London. Thames Water engineers spent a month chiseling, blasting, and ultimately sucking out the greasy, wipe-laden clog that had settled 32 feet below Feltham, the Guardian reports. The culprit: a blend of wet wipes cemented by congealed fat, oil, and grease, part of an all-too-common underground phenomenon. Thames Water shared a photo of the fatberg on Facebook, declaring that it is "officially Unblocktober."
This effort coincides with Thames Water's campaign to remind Britons that what disappears down the drain doesn't actually vanish and can spiral into major headaches—think flooding, environmental damage, and raw sewage backing up into homes or rivers. The company spends $24 million annually clearing 3.8 billion wipes from its system, confronting tens of thousands of blockages each year.
Specialist crews in protective gear worked underground, removing the 410-foot-long blockage with hand tools and high-pressure hoses before sending the waste to a landfill. Thames Water's Alexander Dudfield notes that while colossal fatbergs grab headlines, most blockages start small. "While some blockages in our biggest sewers can weigh as much as 25 elephants, we must not forget most blockages occur in local pipes—often narrower than a mobile phone and usually caused by a few households," he said, per the BBC.
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