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.