Many of us don't often think about the sewage systems underground but millions of dollars are spent each year maintaining them. Blockages caused by 'fatbergs' an accumulation of non-flushable items are wreaking havoc on sewers across Victoria. Water corporations are being forced to get creative in educating the public about what can and can't be flushed.
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00:00It's a smell best kept underground, but these blockages are risking sewage spilling
00:07onto our streets.
00:09Each week we remove about the equivalent weight of two elephants worth of rubbish from the
00:14sewer network.
00:16Barwin Water workers are breaking down the second major blockage, known as a fatberg,
00:22in the same location this year.
00:25Made up of wet wipes, fats and oil, fatbergs cause about 40 per cent of sewer blockages
00:31in Australia, needing to be either extracted or washed out with high pressure water, like
00:38this case in Geelong.
00:40This year there was a blockage in the same location that turned from a fatberg into a
00:44monster that was 15 metres long and about a metre in diameter.
00:48It's an issue across Victoria's water corporations, costing ratepayers hundreds of thousands of
00:54dollars each year, most commonly in Melbourne.
00:58South East Water spending nearly $800,000 annually to remove about 1,000 blockages directly
01:06related to fats and wipes.
01:08For Yarra Valley Water, it's 1,200 blockages, costing nearly $1 million.
01:15We have people coming from other countries, other backgrounds, and their systems are different
01:21to ours, so there are things that they might be able to dispose of that would impact in
01:25a different way.
01:26To educate the community, Barwin Water has put together an exhibition for Geelong Design
01:31Week, allowing the public to build their own fatberg, and to learn the do's and don'ts
01:36when flushing the toilet.
01:37I didn't know that you couldn't wash tissues down the toilet.
01:42Reusable wipes can't be used in toilets.
01:45Less blockages, which means less overflows to the environment and customers' houses,
01:50which means less cost to water customers in terms of cleaning out the sewers as well.
01:55Using arts and crafts to illustrate a wee problem.