In London, “fatbergs” form when fat, oil, and grease combine with products which don’t flow freely, like wet wipes, and create massive blockages in the sewer.
Two separate fatbergs, one over 60 tons and another over 30 tons, were recently cleared by engineers with power tools and by hand.
Imagine that: descending into the London sewers to clear a massive fat block. Hope they pay those people well!
In a related story, a man swam across the Great Pacific Garbage patch. It took him 80 days to get through the vortex where human waste collects. He encountered everything from trash cans to laundry baskets, plastic bags and children's toys, not to mention the tons of microplastics throughout the water.
Microplastics are formed by the continued fragmentation of pieces of plastic. Since they don’t degrade they keep getting smaller and smaller, creating a layer about five meters below the surface. The swimmer, Ben Lacomte, described the microplastics like looking down on a snowy sky.
These two stories got me thinking about the lengths humans have to go to in order to clean up their own mess. Any of the people who come into contact with these sorts of human-made problems risk their health. What if they came into contact with a new sort of disease or infection? This could be the beginning of a plague.
Or, in a more sci-fi approach, there could be a massive state-sponsored initiative to create humans which live in these type of conditions and are tasked with cleaning them. Wall-E meets genetic engineering. Throw in one who has the urge to see the world above the surface and there could be a good story in the consequences of their emergence.
OR, this could turn into a horror story. This same individual finds out he was created to clean up for the above-surface humans, so he decides to get his revenge. Taking them down into the sewers he knows and taking them out one by one. A common story but with a unique origin story, rooted in current problems.
