London’s fatberg on show: ‘We thought of pickling it’ | Culture | The Guardian

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“We have lots of weapons at our disposal,” Saunders says, “but sometimes, as with the Whitechapel one, it is so impacted that a lot of it is the teams going down and chiselling away by hand.” In London, which has a magnified version of a universal problem because the sewers are so large, this work never stops. Thames Water has teams working full time; usually they are aware of five or six fatbergs that are growing. Some cause immediate blockages, others like the one in Whitechapel don’t. Saunders estimates the work costs £1m a month, but that doesn’t include the collateral damage of “sewage flooding living rooms and public spaces cordoned off and out of bounds because they are contaminated”. Because the substance itself is somewhat volatile though, and of an unusual consistency, they still had to rewrite procedure to work out how to deal with it. “We had our head of conservation look at it,” Sparkes says. “We initially thought about pickling it like one of Damien Hirst’s cows. The problem with that, we felt, was that it would likely make it liquid and runny.” What they did instead was to dry the samples. They did this at different rates, uncertain how it would respond. In the event, the one that was dried most quickly has crumbled into pieces; the other remains intact. Health and safety was an inevitable concern. “Worst case scenario if it is handled incorrectly is death,” Sparkes suggests. “It has come out of the sewer so it might contain Weil’s disease.”
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