Thames Water is removing a record-busting ‘Concreteberg’ from under the streets of central London after discovering an industrial amount of solidified cement plugging three Victorian sewers.
The work in Islington will see teams manually chip away at the rock-hard mass for at least the next two months. The subterranean blockage, the biggest the company has ever seen, is thought to be at least 100 metres long and weigh 105 tonnes .
It will cost at least several hundred thousand pounds to clear using a range of cutting tools, including jackhammer pneumatic drills and high-pressure jets.
Alex Saunders, Thames Water operations manager, said:
“Normally blockages are caused by fat, oil and wet wipes building up in the sewer but unfortunately in this case it’s rock-hard concrete. It’s in there and set to the Victorian brickwork, so we need to chip away at it to get it removed.
“This is not the first time damage has been caused by people pouring concrete into our sewers but it’s certainly the worst we’ve seen. It’s very frustrating and takes a great amount of time and effort to resolve. We’re now doing everything we can to deal with it as quickly as possible, making sure our customers don’t have to suffer because of this mindless abuse of our network.”
Thames Water spends £18 million every year clearing blockages from its sewers. The company has pledged to invest heavily to improve the network and increase monitoring as part of its business plan for 2020-25 – using up to 200,000 new sewer depth digital monitors. It has also proposed to reduce pollutions by 30 per cent.
An investigation into how the concrete got into the sewer and to recover costs is underway.
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