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U.S.'s clogged arteries: Sewer fat is causing municipal heart attacks
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NEW YORK - District Council 37, the municipal employees union, has been putting up posters in the subway lately, praising the "everyday heroes" who work for the City of New York. The posters have pictures of a tree pruner, a museum guard, a dental hygienist. Do the guys who get rid of fat clogs in the sewers rate a picture?
Nah.
"Never got on a poster," George Markovics shouts above the oceanic roar of his jet-flusher truck. He is standing over a manhole in south Brooklyn, looking down. At the bottom of the hole, where raw sewage should be babbling along, a smear of sickly gray goop is blocking the pipe. "I like water, you know, sewer - I love it," yells Mr. Markovics, who works for the Department of Environmental Protection. Positioning his rig near the hole, he bellows: "We do a lot for the city. We're the best. Hey, watch your back!"
Maybe Mr. Markovics, who is 40 years old, can qualify as a poster boy for the national sewer-fat crisis. America's sewers are in a bad way. Three-quarters are so bunged up that they work at half capacity, causing 40,000 illegal spews a year into open water. Local governments already spend $25 billion a year to keep the sewers running. The Water Infrastructure Network, a coalition of the waste water-aware, warns that it will cost an additional $@0 billion a year for the next 20 years to keep them from falling apart.
Roots, corrosion, cave-ins, bottles, broken sticks, rusty car parts - anything will divert sewage on its way to the treatment plant. But the blockages now are almost all wrapped up in fat. The perpetrator is fried food.
Fueled by the fast-food frenzy and an influx of immigrant cooks, America's appetite for eating out has bloated the national output of a viscous goop known as restaurant grease - to 1.35 billion kilograms a year. Where does used grease go? Traditionally, into the cauldrons of the rendering industry, which processes animal castoffs into useful products. But for reasons ranging from Malaysia's palm-oil boom to Mayor Rudolph Giuliani's crackdown on New York's garbage Mafia, more goop than ever is ending up in the sewer.
How it wends its way in - by pipe? by bucket? - is a matter of culinary mystery and governmental mystification. Once the goop arrives, the effect is clearer than mud: Grease and sewage don't mix.
Don Montelli stands over a manhole on another Brooklyn corner - a "notorious grease spot," he says, in front of a Chinese take-out restaurant. Mr. Montelli, a high-tech sewer worker, holds a video screen attached by wire to a robot camera down below. "What you're looking at right now," Mr. Montelli explains, "is grease down the sewer."
With colonoscopic clarity, the camera shows a pipe with drippy coating of fat. Fat won't pollute; it won't corrode or explode. It accretes. Sewer rats love sewer fat; high protein builds their sex drive. Solids stick in fat. Slowly, pipes occlude.
Sewage backs up into basements - or worse, the fat hardens, a chunk breaks off and rides down the piple until it jams in the machinery of an underground floodgate. That, to use a more digestible metaphor, causes a municipal heart attack.
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