Raising the American Standard

You know how your doctor hands you pamphlets about how everything you eat is clogging your arteries, leading to all sorts of unpleasant health consequences?  

So then you run home all in a lather, and pat your forehead with one of those disposable personal wipes. And down the toilet goes the wipe...

And the city's "arteries," if you will - the poop pipes and sewer pipes that carry all that you flush or send down the drain - come closer to getting all clogulated. 

Downtown Baltimore now has its own "fatberg." We first heard the term a couple of weeks ago in London, where the same thing was happening. It's a huge clump of what people whose lives involve such unpleasant matters call "FOG" - fats, oils and grease - along with Handi-Wipes, kids' toys, adults' toys, illicit drugs, wadded-up paper towels, toweled-up paper wads, items of clothing, newspapers, and hundreds of other things that should have gone into a trashcan but wound up in the latrine.

The city's Department of Public Works says they located the fatberg earlier this month in a sewer main between Penn Station and the 1700 block of Charles Street. They blame the huge impediment for a sewer overflow that recently sent around 1.2 million gallons of sewage into the Jones Falls.

Underneath our city...

People who study these matters figure that the London Blockage weighed over 140 tons. Baltimore's was much smaller, although it has been given its own zip code and move to the city landfill on the appropriately-named Quarantine Road.

The city wants everyone who flushes or drains - that's pretty much everyone - to remember that FOG congeals in the pipes below and happily collects wipes and all the other junk mentioned above to form mega-clogs.

NORton!

Ed Norton, where are you now? The Art Carney Norton, not the actor. Acting can't save us now.