View from the North 40: Spoiler alert: It's more gross than funny

Fatberg, it’s like an iceberg, but made of fat. It’s a thing. You can look it up.

In fact, you can look up the word definition in a 28-volume Oxford English Dictionary — which is arguably the premier authority on words in the English language — so if the OED says it’s a thing, it’s a thing.

Fatberg is, in fact, a very big thing, hence its blending of the words fat and iceberg. The term for the blended words — like smog, Brexit and jakalope — is portmanteau, in case you wanted to know. The portmanteau, fatberg, rose to popularity among sewer managers in London in the early part of this decade, but Mark Peters, writing for VisualThesaurus.com, says the earliest known usage was in 2008 in the U.K.

The portmanteau was officially recognized by the revered OED in 2015. This is, by any measurement, a meteoric rise in the ranks of official word-dom, and I don’t think it happened because of the word. It’s because of the impressiveness of the fatbergs themselves.

Aug. 6, 2013, in the sewer drains under London Road in Kingston upon Thames, London, sewer system managers reported a mass of congealed fat, wet wipes and various other sewer waste and detritus of both biodegradable and non-biodegradable nature that was as large as a bus and weighed 17 tons.

That is not the largest one ever found. That was an 820-foot long, 150 ton, one found under Whitechapel, London, in September 2017. It took workers, laboring seven days a week, two months and more than $2.3 million, just to get it cleared out.

It was so impressive that two chunks of it were removed, dried and put on display in the Museum of London.

The most recent fatberg, a 210-footer, was reported Tuesday in Sidmouth, England., but certainly, England is not the only place fatbergs develop. Melbourne and Newcastle in Australia have had notable whoppers, in 2014 and 2016 respectively. Wales has had a few.

Baltimore, Maryland, had one in 2017 that caused 1.2 million gallons of raw sewage to spill into Jones Falls, a short stream that eventually empties into the Baltimore Inner Harbor. Detroit, Michigan, had a 100-foot fatberg in September 2018 and Charleston, South Carolina, had a 90-footer in October.

After a fatberg suspected to be larger than the Whitechapel one was found under London’s South Bank in April 2018, BBC filmed a TV special that studied the formation’s contents.

It was, in keeping with its name, mostly cooking oils, but the other big offenders were condoms, sanitary products, diapers, wet wipes and cotton balls, with other items of note including plastics, tennis balls, syringes and wood. It also, obviously, contained raw sewage, along with antibiotic-resistant superbugs listeria, campylobacter and E.coli. The lab also found significant traces of anabolic steroids, cocaine and ecstasy.

So what can we learn from this disgusting new threat to civilization’s most basic infrastructure?

Well, as one wastewater official said, only flush the three P’s — “pee, poo and toilet paper” — so if you’re not going to consume that fat, throw it in the trash. Flushable wipes aren’t. Disposable means landfill. And, If you’re going to just flush away your drugs, find a more eco-friendly addiction, like inventing an affordable, portable system that converts fatbergs into biofuel.

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It’s like we’re living in a modern, reimagined, remake of “The Blob” at [email protected].