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Main Drainage of the Metropolis, though Bazalgette arguably did more than Brunel to shape modern life.
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    The flushers love Bazalgette, and particularly because he built his sewer network with 25 percent extra capacity to allow for population growth. But they have more pressing thoughts than their hero’s cultural legacy. However ingenious Bazalgette’s design was, a system built for 3 million must now cope with the excreta and effluent of 13 million people and hundreds of thousands of industries. Bazalgette couldn’t imagine there would be so many houses, with so many toilets using so much water. That this much can be thrown away, when it needn’t be. He certainly didn’t account for sewers that take everything out being defeated by takeout of another sort.
    There is a mid-level sewer that requires inspection. A nearby park is genteel in darkness, and there is beauty down the manhole, too, in the form of a spiral brick staircase, glistening with damp and other things best not inquired into. “This is an original Bazalgette,” says one of the two men preceding me. Then he stops dead.
    â€œFat.”
    Fat?
    â€œHere, look.”
    The stairs are stuffed with blocks of solid, congealed fat. The industry term is FOG, for Fat, Oil, and Grease. Flushers hate it even more than Q-tips. Faced with this degree of FOG there is only defeat and retreat. Up above, Dave the flusher lets rip. “Fat! It costs millions to clean up. Restaurants pour it down the drains, it solidifies and it blocks the sewers.” They used to use road drills to remove it, he says—“bigRD-9 jobs!”—until new health and safety regulations came into force, and jobs that had been done for years were judged now to be too dangerous. Flushers still talk of the Leicester Square fat blockage which took three months to remove. Once, Dave’s gang was hammering away at a whole wall of FOG, and another gang was doing the same at the other end, until the wall started shifting and nearly squashed the gang on the other side.
    Flushers are phlegmatic about feces or toilet paper or condoms. But they hate fat. “That’s what smells,” says Dave. “Not shit. Fat gets into your pores. You get out and you have a shower at the depot and you smell fine, then you get home and you smell again.” They grimace. “Disgusting stuff.” It is also expensive stuff. Half of the 100,000 blockages every year in London are caused by it. It costs at least £6 million a year to remove. “Contractors do it now,” says a flusher, before muttering “or they don’t, more like.” High-pressure hoses flush out some blockages. Thames Water has been trying out robot fat removers and already uses remotely operated cameras to see what’s what, but for now the best weapons against an unceasing and superior enemy are water, force, and curses. Prevention would be better. Restaurants are supposed to have fat traps, but enforcement is minimal. It costs money to get collected fat carted away, so many restaurants dispose of it down the sewer instead. Leicester Square’s restaurants are no more responsible than Victorian London’s cesspool owners were. Who’s going to find out? Most sewers are only visited when something goes wrong, and monitoring is light. Sewer workers are firefighters: they respond to crisis. In most areas of the UK, only 20 percent of sewers are inspected regularly, and by the end of this century, many of the UK’s 186,000 miles of sewers will be 250 years old. They may be in pretty good condition, but sometimes they don’t work.
    In an average year in the UK, 6,000 homeowners find sewage has backed up into their houses or gardens. Consider for example the troubles of Sonia Young, who spent 100 days cleaning her garden of its unintended sewage pond feature, or new mum Elizabeth Powell in Bath, forced to escape upstairs with her two-week-old baby from a flood of