The 'fatbergs are coming...

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Don't feed the fatberg! What a slice of oily sewage says about modern life

https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2018/feb/18/dont-feed-fatberg-museum-london-clogging-sewers-oil



The fatberg that went on display this month at the Museum of London is proving something of a sensation. Visitor numbers have more than doubled; there is a palpable air of half-term excitement when I visit; and the fatberg fudge – modelled to look like the rough-hewn fatberg brick, with little raisins to represent flies (or something worse) – has sold out. The museum has hit on an unlikely goldmine.

Unsurprisingly, curator Vyki Sparkes is looking pretty pleased with herself, and is already talking about a world tour for her prized object – a slice of the giant Whitechapel fatberg discovered last year. There is just one problem: no one knows if it will survive. It is already changing colour as it continues to dry out, and Sparkes is worried that it may start to disintegrate. It is due to be on show at the museum until July. Best come early to avoid disappointment. But, for now, it is an undoubted triumph, raising the question "what is art" – can hardened sewage in a glass case have aesthetic value? – and confronting us with the environmental destructiveness of our throwaway age.

The Whitechapel fatberg was a source of international fascination because of its size: 250 metres long (the length of Tower Bridge, as the publicists helpfully point out), weighing 130 tonnes and as hard as rock. Thames Water's "flushers" – the men who keep the sewers running – had to dismantle it using high-pressure hoses and pickaxes. It was a monster, and even though only a tiny fragment of it remains at the museum, its monstrousness still both appeals and appals.
Mind that fatberg! My day as a 'flusher' in the London sewers
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It is a piece of organic matter, and small flies hatch out of it and fly around the glass container, to the consternation of onlookers. While I'm there, one young girl recoils at the sight of the lump of hardened sewage and screws up her face in horror, while her grandmother likens it to the creature in Alien and wonders if it will burst out of its case. It is alive and evolving, that is the fascinating and horrible thing about it, and we all created it by throwing away fats, oil, grease, wipes and all the other rubbish that finds its way into the sewers. There is a chocolate wrapper sticking out of the fatberg brick – Sparkes reckons it's a Double Decker – adding an unexpected splash of colour to what otherwise resembles a piece of yellowish-grey lunar rock.

The exhibition is fun – hence the fudge, the fluffy rats and the "Don't feed the fatberg" T-shirts – but it's also serious. Own up, whoever chucked that Double Decker wrapper down a drain. Sparkes tells me she didn't want to lecture anyone in the exhibition she has built around the fatberg, but she is quietly inviting us to consider the Frankenstein's monster we have helped to create. "If we continue to put fat, oil, grease and non-flushable things into the sewers, we are going to grow these monster fatbergs," says Sharon Robinson-Calver, the head of conservation at the museum. "They have got the potential to flood the city, and they are hugely costly for the water companies to remove."

Are they the result of mass selfishness? "I think it's more a mass misunderstanding on our part," she says. "In the first week of the exhibition, from what I've seen of the feedback, people don't realise we are contributing to the problem. One of the reasons for that is things that are labelled as being 'flushable', like face wipes and baby wipes, might be flushable but they are not biodegradable. People are now starting to realise that we are part of the problem, but they have been unwittingly contributing to it rather than doing it deliberately."

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