We all know it's a bad idea to flush anything that's not biodegradable down the toilet. Even things that are supposedly biodegradable can cause enormous problems if too many people discard them into the sewers, like the wet wipes and grease that form fatbergs. But battling a fatberg is child's play compared to what's in London's sewers now.
People pouring concrete into sewers has led to a “concreteberg” forming in central London that weighs 105 tonnes, as heavy as a blue whale.
The 100-metre-long mass is blocking three Victorian-era sewers in the heart of the capital. Thames Water’s operations manager, Alex Saunders, said it was the largest mass of concrete the company had seen, and could take two months to remove at a cost of at least several hundred thousand pounds.
Not that pouring concrete into a toilet has become a fad in London, but some construction company somewhere used the sewers to dispose of the building material. The concrete, apparently liquid at the time, has set rock-hard against the Victorian bricks of the sewage tunnels, and must be chipped away carefully. Read the particulars of this disaster at the Guardian. -via Gizmodo