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Monday, April 15, 2019

FOG in our System


                                            FOG in our System
By Albert B. Kelly

It’s a world of cold, damp, and dark spaces. It’s mostly wet and depending on the circumstances when you descend, it can smell. Very few ever actually see it and even if they could, few would ever want to. It’s a costly and very unforgiving world and while it is slowly transforming, everyone agrees it’s old and archaic. It is a world that impacts every single citizen. One thing that is feared in this particular place is FOG. No, I’m not speaking of Wall Street, though the shoe fits, but of our sewer system.

As systems go, it doesn’t seem like much, but we’re talking about 60 miles of pipes, valves, connection points and mains in a community roughly 6.2 square miles in size. We can’t see the sewer system because it runs below our streets and aside from the occasional manhole cover we drive over, our biggest points of contact with the system comes in the form of kitchen and bathroom sinks, showers, bathtubs, and toilets. The FOG problem is mainly about kitchen sinks and to a lesser degree, toilets.

FOG stands for fats, oils, and grease and when these get forced into the sewer system, it creates enormous problems with backups and blockages. It’s not too much to say that FOG does to sewer systems what LDL cholesterol does to arteries. In the same way that plaque collects along the artery walls; fats, oils and grease harden and congeal along the walls of the pipes in the sewer system. No less than 70% of sewer stops are caused by FOG. Twenty percent are from wet wipes which are not flushable despite what the package says. 

Our sewer department personnel collect roughly 60 million gallons of sewage a month and do what they can with the machines to unclog the lines with a sewer “vacuum” and large “snakes” to try and break up these clogs. But when these measures fail as they increasingly do with an aging system, they then have to cut out sections of clogged pipe and replace it with a new section. It’s the equivalent of bypass graft surgery.

The problem of FOG in our system is not the fault of one person or a single household, but dozens or hundreds of individual households dumping fat, grease, oil, and food wastes down the drain via the kitchen sink. It might happen dozens of times per day through multiple neighborhoods when cleaning the pots and pans from cooking breakfast, lunch, or dinner.

Busy adults take the quickest way available to dispose of the fats, oil, or grease by pouring these down the drain. I understand the thinking which basically holds that a little hot water and soap to “liquefy” the mess makes it appear that all is sufficiently diluted. However, by the time it gets beyond a given house and out into the system, it congeals and hardens and attaches to everything and anything and that’s where the problems start.

Over the years, enforcement and sewer personnel regularly find situations where kitchens in residential homes meant for a single family were being used as a sort of commercial kitchen with bulk ingredients, multiple stoves and refrigerators, and stacks of containers- a prep site for work trucks feeding field workers and it is not uncommon to find blockages in the sewer lines near these dwellings and neighborhoods.

Residential homes and the lines serving residential neighborhoods were never intended to deal with volumes of anything commonly associated with commercial operations let alone oils and grease. But whether from a single family or something more, every time we pour these substances down the drain, we’re that much closer to having to spend taxpayer funds to deal with a preventable problem. 


Our personnel do a good job replacing parts and sections of the system both on an emergency basis and as part of a preventative maintenance approach to keep things in working order. They do so in increments over time and perhaps this is a good thing because if they did it all at once we’d be the ones needing bypass graft surgery.

FOG is costly to taxpayers, so for small amounts of grease, soak it up with a paper towel and place in the trash. For large amounts, let it solidify and then scrape it into a closed-lid container (i.e. coffee can) and dispose of it. For more information on proper disposal, call (856) 455-7257. Please, no more FOG in the system.