New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio is apparently concerned folks in the Big Apple don’t know how to properly use their toilets, so he’s offering a little advice.
New York City: There are only FOUR things that should go in your toilet 🚽
💩 poop
💦 pee
🤢 puke
👋 toilet paperEverything else causes FATBERGS! What are Fatbergs? Well, you gotta click on https://t.co/ZXV9TgF3Oy.
— NYC Mayor’s Office (@NYCMayorsOffice) March 12, 2019
“New York City: There are only FOUR things that should go in your toilet,” the NYC Mayor’s Office posted to Twitter, along with a series of emojis to illustrate the message. “poop, pee, puke, toilet paper
“Everything else causes FATBERGS! What are fatbergs? Well, you gotta click on FatbergFree.nyc.”
According to the site, “the word ‘fatberg’ combines the words ‘fat’ and ‘iceberg’ to describe the masses of congealed grease and personal hygiene products that have been found lingering in sewers around the world.
“They are HUGE, DISGUSTING, DESTRUCTIVE, and COSTLY!”
FatbergFree.nyc is the city’s public service campaign to fight the problem and it features videos and other information, in both English and Spanish.
It’s apparently a problem fueled in large part by “flushable” wet wipes that don’t degrade like normal toilet paper, as well as other sanitary supplies folks flush away without a thought.
Last September, public works employees in Metro Detroit discovered a massive fatberg that measured 11 feet wide, 100 feet long, and 6 feet tall. The clog had filled more than half of the 11-foot diameter Lakeshore Interceptor pipe, forcing the Macomb County Public Works Office to call in a specialist to remove the repulsive mess.
According to The Macomb Daily:
Doetsch Environmental Services, located in Warren, was brought in to break up the fatberg. Joe Schotthoefer of Doetsch said stand procedure to remove such a blockage would be to us air conveyance, or sucking up the waste through an 8-inch tube. But the fatberg was too big for that. Next, Doetsch tried to us a high-pressure stream of water to break the fatberg into pieces, but that didn’t work either. Finally, Doetsch personnel had to manually cut up the blob using handsaws. The smaller pieces were vacuumed to the surface.
The 19-ton fatberg is the biggest Schotthoefer said he’d ever encountered in his 25 years in the business, but it pales in comparison to the world’s largest, discovered under London in 2017.
That fatberg measured more than 800 feet long and weighed in at an estimated 130 tons, or about the same as 11 double-decker buses, according to The Guardian.
Shoebox size pieces of the London fatberg are now at the Museum of London, which began a livestream of the calcified mass of feces, fat, oil, wet wipes and other items in September after a temporary display enthralled visitors.
“Curators said the fatberg had hatched flies, sweated and changed color while on display,” the Guardian reports. “Since being removed on 1 July, the fatberg has grown an unusual toxic mold in the form of visible yellow pustules.”
Samples of the Detroit fatberg, meanwhile, are now research specimens at Wayne State University and are set to go on display at the Michigan Science Center, WDIV reports.
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