From the Vault: The Soap Dragon

a fat Bergs. This was the episode I believe that gave us fatburg Cop so uh, one of our favorite recurring characters on the show. So so yeah, let's let's jump right in. Welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind, a production of I Heart Radios How Stuff Works. Hey, you, welcome to Stuff to Blow your Mind. My name is Robert Lamb and I'm Joe McCormick, and I thought maybe we should start off with a little don't do what Donnie Don't does? All right, tell you tell us about

Donnie Don't. Okay, so let's let's let's see what Donnie Don't is doing and see if maybe we should don't do what he does? Uh, try and spot the don't. So Donnie Don't is he's cooking up a big old mess of French fries in his deep friar, and he eats all the fries while watching RoboCop three, and then it's time to clean up. So first of all, he realizes he is greasy all over from eating this big batch of fries, so he gives himself a good wipe down with some wet wipes, and then he flushes them

down the toilet. Now it's time to get rid of the gallon of duck fat that he used to cook his fries. So what does he do? He pours it straight down the drain in the bathtub. Now, I think most of us can easily I don't know about all of us, because somebody's obviously doing what Donnie Don't does, but I think most of us can easily spot the

Donnie don'ts here. He's made several errors, but now I think it's pretty common knowledge that you are not supposed to flush wet wipes and other non toilet page products down the toilet, and you're definitely not supposed to pour fat down the drain. Yeah, I mean there's some other things that he's doing to potentially criticize. I mean, I don't I don't know how how often he's eating French fries that have been fried in duck fat. Like, if he's doing that too often, that's probably not great for

his health. But you know, once in a while, why not, right, Um, RoboCop three, I have no problem with that. It may not be the strongest of the RoboCop movies, but it's uh it has like cyber Ninjes in it. That's kind of cool. But yeah, it's the it's the wet wipes and then pouring that grease down the drain. And it's the pouring of the grease down the drain. I often forget that. That is a key rule. Oh do you do you break this one? No? I I just I'm generally not in a position to break it because we

just don't. We don't cook with with fat uh much anymore at all anymore. And uh, and then as far as wet wipes go, like I know, not to put wet wipes down though, really no oils in your house, no salad dressing, no like, no olive oil or anything. But not duck fat. Oh well, I mean, of course, other like non animal fats are still like fats and oils. But I guess what I'm thinking, Like I I remember,

so I shouldn't have said just duck fat. I mean that you're not supposed to pour oil or lipids of any time down a drain but but but specifically like the you know, like a big fry vat kind of drainage situation. Like I I remember seeing jars of of of fat and oil like underneath the sink. Oh yeah, growing up, because like that was, you know, the appropriate thing to do. That's a grandma's house kind of thing, like the big old mason jar of bacon grease under

the sink. And then of course when whenever we go, if you go to um a fast food restaurant or even a restaurant in general, you're gonna find that big grease trap outside. Like sometimes it's a little bit hidden, but sometimes there's no place to hide it. It's just right up front. It's just there in the parking lot. Yeah. I remember one of my jobs that I worked at

when I is in college. Every morning when i'd go into it, I'd have to park in the parking lot of a restaurant that was like next to where I worked, and I parked right next to their big it was like a Burger and Fry's place and the heart next to their big grease grease depository. Uh. And it just looked like the saddest robot from some Star Wars spinoff, like Lithuanian Star Wars has our Ford, uh, you know D seven And it's this big black thing with with

like this dripping, sad, grease tears stained head. But of course that's this restaurant usage, and we can I think we can all understand that. I mean, there's certain rules and regulations there they're following, and they're also producing just

a ton of this, uh, this material. I wonder if like the problem with a household situation is either you're creating so little that you don't think about it, so it's like death by thousand cuts right right, or you know, when you do produce a more sizeable amount doing you know, some sort of frying scenario like you do, suddenly have this this huge mess to clean up. And it's easy to just convince yourself, I'm just gonna do the easy thing. I'm just gonna go and put it down the sink

and next time I'll do better. Right, Who's gonna know, But maybe we should step back and ask a question. I mean, it's not like RoboCop is going to show the house, right, right, So that's what they do in RoboCop too, right. They reprogram him so instead of fighting crime, he goes out and he he pursues uh, minor infraction, minor and littering and stuff like that and people using swear words. Uh. So we should ask this question of wait a minute, why are you not supposed to do

these things? Why are you not supposed to pour oil and fat and grease down the drain? Well, one reason you're not supposed to do this has to do with the way sewers work. Sewers are, I say, with no hesitation, one of the greatest human inventions. And if you doubt this, listen to our invention episodes on the toilet, or listen to uh we did an episode of stuff to blow

your mind out, the miasma theory of disease. And in all of these we talk about how you know, properly maintained sanitary sewer facilities are are not not just there to make our homes and our streets more pleasant, like they play a crucial role in protecting public health and preventing outbreaks of diseases, especially fecal oral route diseases which

are as gross as they sound, diseases like cholera. UH. Sewers work when everything flows smoothly to its destination point at a treatment facility, and they're one of the best innovations in the history of civilization. I say that no qualifications at all. But sometimes things get in the way, like tree roots can intrude on sewer pipes and block flow. We live here in Atlanta where there are a lot of trees and a lot of a lot of old large trees and places that are intersecting with sewer pipes,

and so this we know about this happening a lot. UH. And of course they can cause turbulence and this can lead to build up. Or we can have old, decaying sewer mains that crack and do similar stuff. And sometimes blockages in these sewer sewer pipes occur from the inside out. One of the most all inspiring things that can block a sewer is what we're going to be talking about today. It's something that has in recent years come to be

known as a fat berg. According to an article I was reading by Kelly oaks and new scientists from earlier

this year. Uh. This term was apparently coined in two thousand and eight, but it became widely popular after news reports about a huge fatberg in and what it refers to is a giant, solidified mass of stuff based on fats and oils that just states in the heart of a sewer system, feeding on things like wet wipes and floss and other trash, but especially on fats and the byproducts of fats, like cooking oils, you know, uh, grease from cooking animals, all that stuff that people wash down

the drain when they just either dump out oils they cook with or just when they wash their dishes and the oils that are already on the dishes come come off and go down the down the tubes. Yeah, I understand that they're like the wet wives, the floss, all that can can sort of serve as a substrate. Right. It was like a scaffolding on which this, uh, this new mass will form. Yeah, and we'll talk about how

it forms in a little bit. But I wanted to talk about the terminology because while fat bergs has really caught on with the public, this is like what I think The reason that there have been so many articles in recent years about fat bergs is just because of the term fat bergs, Like there was now this beautiful, attractive terminology for it, whereas previously, especially in the US, I think they were referred to primarily with the acronym fogs for fat oil and grease or frogs for fat

roots as in tree roots and oil and grease. But have a really missing opportunity there to dug to dub them for instead of frogs, same letters, but it would have scratched more of a chudditch, you know, and I think maybe would have resonated a little more. Maybe not as much as fat bergs ultimately did, but I mean attack of the forges where the forges, I feel like that could have resonated with with the public. If there is not already a movie about one of these things

becoming sentient, there will be soon. But one particularly massive fat burg that we might linger on for a bit has been covered extensively, especially in the British press. This was the White Chapel Burg. It was removed in Tween and it was a mass blocking the sewer under the under White Chapel Road in East London. I think this was Jack the Rippers neighborhood. Yeah, I think that adds to the appeal of the white Chapel Fatburg. And it sounds even more sinister exactly. And the burg itself, in

a way, was sort of a white chapel. It's like this, uh, this unholy things, sort of a gray off white color. And so it was about two hundred and fifty meter ars long or about eight hundred and twenty feet, and it weighed probably about a hundred and thirty tons. And this monster was so magnificent that a piece of it was broken off and displayed in a special exhibit in the Museum of London. And I came across a gorgeous, absolutely haunting description of this sewage fatburg fragment by Sam

Knight in The New Yorker. And this, this description of the Fatburg was so moving that I have to quote from it. Are you ready, Robert? The piece of Fatburg was slightly smaller than a loaf of bread and looked like it might have come from the moon. It was putty colored and marked everywhere with geological looking indentations, including a cluster of fingerprints from when it was removed from a sewer. In East London last October and lifted through

a manhole. On the surface, there was also a dark fragment from an autumn leaf which must have slipped down the drains into its mall. Emerging through the congealed cow alsified fat was the purple and orange perforated edge of a double decker chocolate bar wrapper. Every detail of the hideous object was starkly visible because it was resting on a bed of black granules under a spotlight in a glass box at the Museum of London at the opening

of its new exhibition Fat Bird. I stared at it for a while, and while I did so, a tiny dark speck on the Fat Bird became animate and started to move. A fly the size of a pinhead flew up and battered against the glass. That's pretty great because he capture us this sense of it almost being alive and uh, and and also this this haunting feeling that

it is like our sins. Uh, may you know, manifested into a physical form, Like here is all your recklessness and your you're you're willing and stuff to flush inappropriate things down the toilet. Well, here it is altogether, uh, to confront you to point it's grotesque finger at Yeah, I hope this description of the fatburg it's nominated for like a Pulitzer Prize. That's uh, it's powerful stuff. But the seen white chapelberg that mentioned a minute ago was

by no means the only fatburg. Fat Burgs form all the time in cities all around the world due to people flushing and washing fats and other inappropriate stuff down the drain. According to Night's article, it's estimated that London alone has at least five large fat bergs at any given time, So sometimes you know, they go down there to fight them, but they're they're always new ones forming. So let's talk about size. They can become so huge.

Let me restate what I said a minute ago. This white Chapel beast was two hundred and fifty meters long, which is approximately the length of the Hindenburg, and it weighed probably about a hundred and thirty tons or heavier by about a third than the biggest ever soarra pod dinosaurs. Of course, it makes sense because they were talking about

a massive sewage system. We're talking about massive consumption, a massive population, and therefore the clog the thing is going to be massive as well, well, yeah, and also you want to consider the particulars of the London sewer system, because this is where a lot of these stories come from.

The London sewer system. You know, it's it's got Victorian elements, and it was the sewer system built over a hundred years ago, uh, you know, back in Victorian times, as a response to the great stink you know that we've talked about on on this show before, where the you know,

sewage being discharged into the Thames. One year in the believe it is the eighteen fifties or sixties, sometime in the middle of the nineteenth century, it got so foul and it stanks so bad that Parliament was just you know, about to puke in their uh, in their deliberation chambers.

And so they eventually did something about it, and that was to get this sewage system, uh, not only because of the smell, but also because it was a you know, the sewage system that they had in place of the time, which consisted of more like open sewers in the streets and stuff draining into the Thames which then people would drink out of. It was just leading to the collar out breaks and terrible public health conditions and these horrible stinks.

So they created this massive sewer system under the ground in order to take away all of the waste water and discharge it away from the city. So you've got these like in some cases very large, like old, elaborate and some sometimes kind of beautiful brick built sewage channels and you know, access tunnels and all this. Uh so,

so you've got old facilities. But you might be wondering. Okay, so one of these giant beasts, You've you've got a hindenburg of fat and sewage and waste stuck in the sewer, blocking, blocking things, preventing them from flowing. What do you do about it? Well, that's the question. We're gonna take a quick break and when we come back we will answer it. Okay, we're back. So we're talking about fat bergs. How do

you fight them. You've got one of these giant concrete fat conglomerations made out of wet wipes and and dental floss and old you know, wrappers of food and bits of plastic, and of course all of these fats and oils and grease and sewage and waste. It just makes this huge mass that blocks up the sewers. What do you do about it? Well, you literally have sewer workers that go down to break it up and remove it. The city sewer workers in London are known as flushers,

and they have to fight these wicked villains. They have to go down and confront the ball rog in person. And in Night's article in The New Yorker, he he talks about the process of breaking up the White Chapel mass. So, first of all, he says, they've got to wear protection, and they've got to have a breathing apparatus because this

thing is in a way alive. It's got a lot of uh life feeding on it, and as a result, it can let out sudden explosion of gas like hydrogen sulfide, which of course smells like rotten eggs and is the It's a common gas released as a byproduct of decaying organic matter, but it also releases methane, and sometimes it can just blast out carbon monoxide, which can be deadly. So let's say you're outfitting your D and D Adventure the flusher class to go down into this dungeon and

fight the monster. What weapons do you want to equip them with? We'll probably not fire. Fire would seems like a bad idea. Oh yeah, that's uh. And and unfortunately they are not a magic using class, so they don't have any spells available to them. I don't know. Is that a thing in D and D there's some classes who can't do spells, right? Uh? Yeah, I mean it seems like there are a lot of classes that have some sort of magical abilities, especially as they level up.

But yeah, this sounds more like like fighter um uh material right here. You need somebody to go down and physically fight this physical threat and remove it. These are paladins. I'll allow it. I'll allow it. I mean, paladins have some some you know that they have holy powers, et cetera. But a lot of these powers are about like, you know, increasing their physical prowess. Right, Okay, certainly I don't know my stuff. Sorry, Okay, we'll say their paladins anyway. Uh So,

the Mighty Flusher's weapons include the bomb hose. That's the term bomb hose, which is just like a high pressure water jet that should be able to cut through blockages. It's like a cutting jet. But apparently, according to Night's article, even this didn't work all that well on the hardened mass of the White Chapelberg, and so later on these these warriors had to use more old fashioned implements like pick axes, shovels, and he says in one case even

us Saul. When pieces were removed and kept for the London Museum exhibit, one expert who handled them described the fatberg chunks as sort of hard but light feeling like pumice stone. I think that was interesting. Yeah, but even the smaller one so so that one's gigantic, But even the smaller ones are still huge in disgusting ways. I've on a brilliantly funny article with a great title on Atlas Obscura by Jessica lee Hester from January of this year,

is called seven big Things. They're smaller than this fatburg, and it refers to another British fatburg, one found in a sewer beneath the town in beneath the town in Devon, and according to the water utility in that area, it was the largest fatberg that they had come across in that area. It was about two ten feet or about sixty five ms uh. And so so what are the things she lists as smaller than this fatberg, at least in terms of dimensions. I don't think they had weight

on it at the time she was writing. Um, so smaller in terms of length was the above water surface height of the iceberg that sunk the Titanic, the tallest known Ginko tree in the world, the Christ the Redeemer statue, and Rio de Jannaro, the Coney's Island or the Coney Islands Wonder Wheel, uh, the Statue of Liberty, the Roman Colosseum, and Nelson's column in Trafalgar Square all smaller than this Fatburg, which is not even the largest Fatburg by a long shot.

And she also pointed out something in in her article that was just an interesting phrasing of things that it's sort of echo thoughts I'd been having as I was reading about Fatburg's in in Hester's words quote, the chunky gunky sewer cloggers are murky mirrors into the behaviors of people above ground because they hold all the stuff we flush and try to forget about, including cooking, grease, napkins, floss, minstrel products which don't belong in the pipes in the

first place. So it's this idea of like these are sort of the the places of all the things that we want to just get out of our lives. It's, you know, the purging of convenience all becomes this mass. Yeah, and again it kind of it confronts us once more. The horror is even greater because it is all it is a it's it's congealed into this this massive form.

And I think maybe that is part of like the psychological reason why people can't look away, Like why was there a museum exhibit about these things where everybody wanted to go see them? It's this fascinating, uh, you know, almost kind of freudy and feeling kind of thing, like the suppressed part of our culture and civilization. It's what's shoved down and covered up and not looked at, almost out of a sense of shame, and it becomes this stuff.

And and a lot of our modern life is about distancing ourselves from the reality of our waste, from the reality of our dead things of this nature. So so yeah, I think it's it definitely speaks to us on that level. Okay, maybe we should turn to the question of how, like how do simple bits of cooking oil and other fat turn into these mighty slumbering beasts, the monsters of the dungeon because it could seem almost magical right that it's it's it's like this thing has become alive down there.

It is like one of these uh you know, they're multiple uh uh you know, I think horror properties where some sort of garbage monster come is alive, and it basically fulfills the same purpose we're talking about here, to confront us and to uh, you know, to to show us the horrors of our of of of our you know, disposable society. But but there's a very but the process is happening here is not magical. It is you know, we can we can we can look at what is

happening chemically. Yeah. Uh so obviously there's one extremely simple way that there are multiple ways here, but there's one extremely simple way that fat can end up blocking sewer pipes, and that's by congealing. Like if you ever cooked bacon, cooked bacon in a pan, what happens, Well, the white solid fat in the bacon in the animal flesh renders. It turns into a fluid that runs around in the pan like water, and it flows, so you can pour it out, et cetera. You can pour it down the drain.

But that's only because it's hot. If you take that bacon grease and you leave it out at room temperature, you put it in the fridge, we all know what happens, right, It turns into a kind of waxy solid and this is large, right. Yeah, I guess the cure process of bacon doesn't change that. Yeah. So it's pork fat either way. Uh. And now not all fats can geal into solids or

semi solids at room temperature, but plenty do. So if you melt this fat and then pour it down the sink into cold pipes and wash it away, the cooling fat forms a solid or semi solid mass that can build up. It can coat surfaces and so forth, and can of course block sewer pipes. So that that that's like the simple version. That's just one way fat can

clog up your sewers. That one reason you don't want to put it down there, right, And I think we can all grasp that even if if you've ever washed dishes before, you can get a sense of how, how what's happening exactly. But this is actually not the main piece of chemistry contributing to fat bergs. The truth is actually weirder. Often the fats that we wash down the drain essentially become soap. The chemical process is known as

saponification uh. This word comes from the Latin sapo, meaning so And once a mass of fat gets washed down the drain, it chemically breaks down into fatty acids, and these fatty acids undergo a chemical reaction in the alkaline environment of the sewer, combining with other elements and compounds, often calcium, to form this calcified soap like deposit. And of course, as we all know, soap can be pretty solid, like you you don't want to get whacked with a

bar of soap in the bottom of sock. But it gets even worse because calcified fat bergs build up a real kind of rigidity. Like the workers who have to cut them out sometimes compare them to concrete by the time you have to go in and break them up. Uh. And I don't know exactly what leads to all that. It might be this forming of a solid mass and then like the sort of compacting of time, you know,

thing of pressure just forcing it together. But the soap like masses tend to form around solid pieces of trash that get flushed down the toilet. So that's the other major component we mentioned earlier. Like wet wipes are by far the worst defender here. This is in all the British press about this is just saying like, don't wash fats and oils down the drain and don't flush wet wipes. Don't flush wet wipes. Wet wipes are like the most

hated thing but the sewer workers. And that's of course because you know, they're not designed industrially the way like toilet paper is, which is made to break up when it's in this aqueous environment. The wet wipes tend to not break up. They stick together and they form a sort of binding or substrate for this nightmare soap of

the deep on its way to becoming a berg. I mean, it makes me think of the of the science stories we've covered about uh creating artificial Say years we have some sort of a scaffolding on which you're gonna you're gonna build up like the you know, the collagen and create this artificial piece of flesh. It's kind of like

that process taking place in a foul sewer. But imagine that process is taking place where stuff just keeps flowing into it, so it just keeps getting more solid material like wet wipes and more like binding soap like fat structure until it becomes an ear the size of the Hindenburg. Another contributor to the fat bergs in the London sewers, and not just the London sewers in other places, but

especially in London sewers is old rough brick surfaces. I'm not positive, but I think the mechanism here is that rough surfaces create more friction with the flowing water, and this causes turbulence. Instead of flowing smoothly the water or the you know, the sewage, it gets sort of churned up and this interrupts the smooth flow and it gives uh and and so it causes build up of solid matter.

But also I think the rough surfaces just sort of give the wet wipes and other trash little crags to catch on, and then of course once they catch on, other things can catch onto them, and it just builds up from there. Yeah. And and also so these soap like masses are not water soluble, meaning they're not dissolved by water, so they're not gonna over time just like break up and wash away with the flow of the

sewer water. They just sit there and they build up and they grow too mescent with new waste and trash and layers of soapy solids made out of fat, until somebody finally goes down there to slay the dragon. And as we discussed, of course the battles of the flushers, you have to you physically break these things up and

remove them. Yeah, again with things like pick axes and saws, because it is almost like concrete, you know, it's not just this big, you know, gross sewer jelly that you just need to sort of, you know, flush a little bit more, you know, just spray with water and you know you'll get it done. A plunger is not going to do it. Now. In some cases, I do think these like water jet hoses can be used to cut it up. They just, at least in the one case I was reading about, they weren't quite doing the job

and they had to resort to the old ways. Also, I just wanted to do a little side note on sepontification because what's happening here in the sewers is not exactly the same as but it's somewhat analogous to, uh, something that I'm very interested in that occasionally happens to human bodies in certain burial conditions. Robert, have you been to the Mooder Museum in Philadelphia. I haven't. I've never visited Philly. Yeah, I haven't been, but I've wanted to

for a long time. So they've got an exhibit, or I don't know about an exhibit. They've got a thing at the Modern Museum that is a human body. It's known as the Soap Lady. And do you know the soap Lady. No, but I'm already horrified because I know enough about the mood Museum to know that a soap lady there is going to be a site to behold. I think they've got a soap lady and a soap man. I've primarily read about the soap Lady, so those two

should mean exactly. So. It was originally believed that she was a woman who had lived in Philadelphia in the eighteenth century and had died of yellow fever sometime in

the seventeen nineties. But in nineteen eighty six they did some X rays of the body of the Soap Lady and this revealed that she was wearing clothes with like buttons and pins that weren't manufactured in the US until around the eighteen thirties, So it's now believed that she must have died later than was originally believed, but whenever

she died. In eighteen seventy five, her body was exhumed from a local cemetery, and it was discovered that the corpse was encased almost entirely in a solid soap like substance, and that she was essentially a soap mummy. If you look at pictures of her, she looks like a mummy. She looks like some of these uh, like you know, sort of dried mummified, preserved corpses that you might find in the case of some of like the Andean mummies.

Um except that she has except that, like her features are less defined, and she's got a bunch of extra stuff around the outside of her body, like almost like she's encased in some kind of concrete or something, but it's not concrete. This substance in reality is something kind of like soap. It's not exactly so, but it's something known as adipus here, also sometimes referred to as corpse wax or grave wax. Now, I do think I remember reading about this like years and years past and some

you know texts on decomposition. Uh yeah, there there's some interesting stories about the role of grave wax in uh in. Like, so, one thing that corpse wax does when it forms around a body is that it can help preserve some of the elements within um. And this like keeps corpses from decaying like they would normally. And so the formation of adapas here, I do believe, is it's chemically considered a form of suppontification, like what's happening with the fat bergs

and the sewers. Adapas are is this waxy substance that sometimes forms around dead bodies since they decay, particularly in certain kinds of burial conditions. And these environments tend to be alkaline, you know, like the the opposite of acidic. They tend to be anaerobic, meaning without access to air, and they tend to be warm and moist, which are just you know that generally sounds like the kind of environments you don't want to bury bodies. But you know,

some soil is like that. And and and I'm guessing at least some of these are gonna gonna match up with with sewer scenarios. And we've talked before about some of the the organisms that can grow in a sewer environment that really thrive in a in a like a low oxygen environment. Yeah, exactly, So freshly formed adipas here can be kind of soft and waxy, but older adipas

here can more closely resemble something like concrete. I was reading a Live Science article about this by Wynn Perry, and the author quotes an anthropologist from North Carolina State University named Anne Ross, and she says, quote, a lot of people say it's greasy. I always think of it like a thick cottage cheese consistency, because it's kind of lumpy. Also, so maybe not the grave wax of the grave soap, but the grave cottage cheese, cottage cheese of the dead,

the corpse cheese. Alright, well, on that grotesque note, let's one more break, and when we come back, we have some other fatburg facts to roll through, and uh, you know, maybe we'll talk to us a little bit about about the sewer monster movies at the end of the episode. Alright, we're back, Okay, so quite clearly, uh, these things you don't want fat Bergs in your sewers, and yet they

form in sewers under cities all over the world. It's happening all the time because of this combination of like stuff that people shouldn't flush and fats and oils going down the drain, which I guess both variations of the same thing. You know, stuff that you shouldn't put down

the drain is going down the drain. Uh. And in the article I mentioned earlier in New Scientist Kelly Oaks refers to a University College Dublin professor named Tom Curran who is who works in this field, and he says that the major factors contributing to a sort of recent increase in fatburg incidents in London are of course like a larger populations in cities, so it's just more people washing more stuff down rains. Aging sewers contribute a lot.

One factor is more dining out at restaurants, because it appears that restaurants are responsible for a huge amount of the fats and oils that go down the drain. You know, you know, I would have thought it would be more regulated with the restaurants. Apparently it's Uh. In the UK, at least it is not as regulated as some people think it should be or I don't know if that's

changed recently. In the articles I was reading from the past couple of years, it's I think there's a problem with like last lack of specificity in regulations, Like there are regulations that say restaurants aren't supposed to wash anything down the drain that would be harmful to the sewer system, but like it doesn't specifically say don't wash fats and oils down the drain, okay, And then the other big

thing is, of course trashally goes down the drain. But there's you know, as we've already said, there's like one huge culprit here that's like of the problem, and it's wet wipes. It just seems like that one would be an easier one to knock. It seems like that would be something we could solve. Is like, if you use a wet white no matter what you used it for, no matter how defoul it is, just put it in

a garbage can. Like maybe maybe it's easier because you go to something you know, you travel to, you know, to certain parts of the world where the sewer system can't even handle toilet paper, and you get used to it you know, like at first it may seem a little weird, like, oh, you know, I must wipe and then put the toilet paper into a receptacle. Uh. You know, it runs against what you've been doing, but you get used to it and it becomes the new normal. I

didn't even know that was the thing. Oh yeah, I mean you travel. Um, it just depends on the on the sewage system. And yes, some just can't handle the paper. Um. So you know, it's it's it's asking even less I feel to say, look, just you have a wet wipe. I know you just used it on some disgusting part of like a two year old body, but you know

you just put in the garbage. Apparently, so I was reading in the same article that you know, there are there are things that have proved effective, and it's essentially

regulating the stuff we're talking about. It's like regulating what restaurants can put down the drain and putting grease traps in place and all that, but then also doing like public education campaigns to get people to not put anything in the toilet other than human waste and toilet paper, and that this has been effective and like doubling already.

But it's it hasn't been effective enough everywhere, And I wonder if the problem is that, I mean, I would hope that in a campaign against Fatburg, somebody has created, with practical effects and costuming, an anthropomorphic fat Burg creature, you know, or even like a you know, like thinking about when I know we both love good like paranormal cops ploitation films from years past, like Maniac Cop and so forth. And there was that cool trailer from what

was it, melt Cop or something. Yeah, like they could make Fatburg cop and so Fatburg copy. Is this like anthropomorphic Fatberg in a police uniform that it comes to your apartment or your restaurant and chastises you for your destructive ways. Fatberg Cop versus Flukeman the next big crossover hit. Oh yeah, or they're they're buddy It's a buddy cop.

Oh yeah. Wait, this is making Fatberg's the hero as you're doing it backwards, one of the fat Burg in the same way that the Fatburg confronts us Fatburg becomes the hero, like he's a cop made out of Fatberg, raising consciousness about the need to destroy his own kind. Well, no he's not, you know, he's like Uh, he didn't want to be in fatberg form. You know. Maybe I don't know, maybe he was previously human. I don't know,

maybe he took on human consciousness. Maybe it's kind of a you know, a swamp things swampman kind of a scenario. Why don't they look? But I mean, it can be hard to get people to behave you know, it's like it's just usually pretty easy to get away with flushing and draining things you shouldn't because who's going to catch you? Something that is momentarily your problem is now just gone, it's purged, and it becomes instead like a small part of a big problem that is everybody's problem. It's not

your problem right now, right. And of course this, I mean there's so many other things, uh, in the world that can fall into this category. This is the tragedy of the commons. I mean, it's you know, people have shared common resources that they all need. The biggest one

probably is like the natural environment. It's you know, supposed to be something that is of common access to everyone, but in fact there are individual actors who over exploit and foul and cause damage to this common resource resource that should be shared by everybody. Because it's momentarily convenient for them and they can get away with it. It's one of the most crucial flaws in human psychology that we exploit common resources this way and in that way.

I do think we should think about sewers as a type of commons, just like we would think about like the oceans, the rivers, the air, the environment. Sewers are a common shared resource among all the people who use them, and should be treated as such, even though it's definitely that kind of thing where we don't want to think about it and we try not to think about it

unless it's broken. Right. Well, Apparently, when the London Museum was running this Fatburg exhibit, it had a plaque on the wall that read as follows the size and foulness of fat bergs makes them impossible to ignore and reminds us of our failings that they do. It seems like something that should be inscribed over like the I don't know, over over the door of like a Puritan church from the seventeen hundreds. But I should also point out I was reading that. Uh, at the same museum exhibit they

sold something called fat burg fudge. I guess this was in the museum cafe, they'd have to have something like in the cafe or the gift shot to line up with it. Literally a sweet treat modeled on a fatburg brick with raisins to represent flies. You know we mentioned earlier. You know that, of course London isn't the only city to have to deal with this. Obviously, there are other large metropolitan area uh that that are plagued by fat burgs.

And I was reading ant Geo article titled huge Blobs of Fat and Trash or Filling the World Sewers by Erica Inglehop, and this was a really nice article as well, if I remember correctly. The lead UH said that, you know, in one part of the city, someone flushes a wet wipe, and another part of the city someone flushes some oil. When those two meet, a baby fat burg is born. So I I applaud the the writing in this article.

But angle Hop points out that in New York City, according to the city's two thousand sixteen State of the Sewers Report, Greece causes seventy one of sewer backups in the city. Uh. And then and and as a and as a result, New York City spends eighteen million spent eighteen million dollars over a five year period fighting fatburgs. But even in smaller U. S cities you can see, um, you know, the local government having to blow like half a million dollars a year to battle these build ups.

And uh. Another interesting thing that ingle Hop pointed out though, was that, um, there was a particular River Thames project with argent Energy uh to potentially harvest fat burgs and turn them into renewable fuel. And this is pretty sensible

if you think about it. I mean, all that oil going down the drains, uh, you know, it should be going somewhere else, such as in the case of restaurants, into grease traps um which are and and sometimes grease traps are are pilfered for this very reason because their contents are valuable in a sense. Uh and and and there are also parts of the world where you know, essentially sewer oil is is reclaimed and sort of sold on the black market, you know, kind like sewer oil.

But I think this has been done with some of the British fat bergs. I don't think all of them, I'm I'm not sure, but yeah, I think at some point some of them have become biofuel. Yeah, I mean, and it seems like a logical alternative to the typical fates for a fat burg which are I mean it if you except for the rare pieces that go to the museum to become art, uh you know, other stuff, it's either being hauled off to a landfill or it's broken up so as to better diffuse into the sewer system. Um.

So yeah, to whatever extent you could. I mean, obviously, you want to prevent the fat bird to begin with. You don't want to have to toil with it. Um. You know, even if you get to the point where you could send a robot down to battle the fat birds, it's you still gotta you know, haul it up uh and all, and then potentially hauled off to a landfill. But if it could be turned into fuel, if it could you know, uh, power the Deloreans the future, then

that sounds like the way to go. Well. I do think it is a good idea to turn these things as long as they are still being made into fuel. But don't don't get distracted by that as like an excuse to Okay, so it's not so bad if we keep making them because they turn into fuel, right, right. I mean, because again, the stewer systems are not made

for fat birds. Like if you I guess, if you reach the situation where you're like, look, we refuse to learn, we're not gonna stop rushing oil and wet wipes, then okay, you could conceivably imagine a scenario where the sewer systems have to be redesigned in order to um, you know,

sequester fat bergs for harvesting. But they're not built like that, and they're probably not going to be rebuilt like that, and it's ultimately an easier prospect to just change how we're handling the things that we're sending down into the sewer. This is going to become some crack pop political parties energy platform, and they're saying all this talk about you know, green energy. What you do is you pour oil down the drain all day, our energy problems are solved. I'm

not super up on British politics. Is there a fat bird party? Yet? I know that the new parties get get formed here and there. Um, I can't heard about it, but I'm sure. I mean, like all issues, especially issues in fact that have to do with people exploiting or ruining the commons for everybody. These issues often do get like politically polarized because it's advantageous for somebody to do that.

And this is why we need fat bird cop out there on the beat, in the in the you know, at least in the eyes of the public, in the messaging, uh, you know, confronting us, chastising us far aways, um and and and but I mean, I mean that's seriously because I think, like, for my part, like one of the reasons that the other reasons that fat birds are so captivating, uh, in addition to all the grotesque photos and footage that

shows up. I saw one article is like a video based article online that the title was something along the lines of the moment when a rat crawls out of the fat bird, and that was apparently the footage of the like a live rat swarming out of fat bird. Um. You know, so we can't look away from the grotesque

nature of them. But then also you the sewers are this unique location where there have been a number of notable films over the years that populate the sewers with monsters, be it you know, Chud's or or you know or or or Cannibals is in the Bridge ash film Raw Meat, Well, I guess that was a subway system, but still an environment stuff in Ghostbusters too, I think, yeah, the river of slime flowing out of New York City, that's a

big one for me. But also definitely the Blob at least remake kind of lot of like uh, you know, under I think there was like these sewer system Shenanigan's there with the blob, you know, ripping through the sewer and attacking people. Yeah, and it definitely came up through the drains. So it's I feel like the fat Berg reminds us of these monstrosities as well, except there they're not fantasy, they're real, uh you know, they just don't actually assault us, try to digestue well. I feel like

some of these, especially Ghostbusters too. Yeah, it does bring in some of that same metaphor stuff we were talking about earlier about you know, like it it's all the bad things we don't want to think about and all the negative energies that that is what was feeding the slime and Ghostbusters too, right, it was like Prince Vigo and just New Yorkers being jerk. That's kind of weird for a sequel to a movie in which an e P A representative was a villain. But there you go.

It's a different time. Ghostbusters a bravely pro littering movie. Al Right, Well, there you have it. A fat Bergs for you. Now. Obviously, if anyone out there has direct experience with fat Bergs or any other strange monstrosities in our sewer systems, let us know. I feel like, just thinking about the sheer number of listeners and just all the you know, the diverse backgrounds that you all have, somebody out there has had to have battled the fat bird.

We've got a first hand flusher in the audience. I know it. Yeah, it's just a matter of getting you to write in and tell us about it. Uh So, you know, if so, do right in and tell us about it. And also just if there's some sort of sewer monster movie that we've failed to reference, uh yeah, hit us up on that as well. We're always happy

to cha out about movies. And hey, if you're if you're an artist, maybe you can create uh an image of fat bird cop because I feel like you'd be not only amusing us and amusing other listeners, you would potentially be um, uh you know, saving the world by introducing this character. In the meantime, if you want to check out more episodes of Stuff to Blow Your Mind, head on over to stuff to Blow your Mind dot com.

That's where we'll find them all. You'll also find out links to social media accounts as well as link to our t shirt store. But ultimately the best thing you can do to support the show is to just make sure you you rate and review us wherever you have the power to do so. Wherever you get this podcast huge thanks as always to our excellent audio producer, Tari Harrison.

If you would like to get in touch with us directly with feedback about this episode or any other, to tell us about your battles for the fat Berg, to suggest a topic for the future, to suggest a guest, or just to say hello, you can email us at contact at stuff to Blow your Mind dot com. Stuff to Blow Your Mind is a production of iHeart Radio's How Stuff Works. For more podcasts from my heart Radio, visit the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows. B