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An unnamed man in the town of Montmélian, France, dropped his wallet into a sewer opening in a parking garage and went to retrieve it. He then became stuck, with his head in the pipe and his legs sticking out of the manhole. The man spent the entire night like that until a passer-by called emergency services in the morning. After he was rescued, police figured out what he was doing when it happened.
Unfortunately for the man, there were yet more problems in store. Police also spotted that he had been siphoning off waste oil from his car into the sewer at the time.
Disposing of waste oil in this way is an offence in France, with serious cases risking up to two years in prison and a fine of €76,000 ($97,000).
The moral of the story: if you do something illegal, don’t get caught with your head in a sewer. Link -via Arbroath
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The River Fleet in London is a tidal river that once provided water for many industries. Over the years, it became quite polluted, then was consigned to flow underneath the city as London grew, until it was eventually incorporated into the sewer system. But the river is still there, filling its tunnels at high tide and ebbing to a trickle at low tide. Read about what happened to the River Fleet and see plenty of pictures at Kuriositas. Link
(Image credit: Flickr user sub-urban.com)
Workers from the Thames Water company in east London plead with customers not to pour grease down the drain, because it clogs the sewers. That message is sing the tune of “Good King Wenceslas”. From the YouTube link:
Thames Water will donate 1p to WaterAid for every hit the film gets on YouTube (up to a maximum of 200,000 views, ending on 31 January 2011) to support the charity’s life-saving work to improve access to safe water and sanitation to the world’s poorest people.
The toilet is one of those things we take for granted, until it breaks down or we go somewhere without them. How did our modern comfort system come about? Toilet plumbing is older than you think!
Ancient cultures were surprisingly adept at moving water around in a way that kept people from having to walk through pools of their own feces. (That was really more of a Medieval European thing.) Cultures as far back as 3000 BC were flushing away their problems—so who you callin’ primitive? Members of the Harrappa civilization in what is now India had toilets in their homes that drained into subterranean clay chambers. The residents of Skara Brae, a 31st century BC settlement in what’s now Scotland, were even clever enough to use a draining system that exploited a nearby river to automatically sweep out their dirty business.
None of these systems were anything like the flush toilet -that came later. Read all about it at Gizmodo. Link
(Image credit: Sam Spratt)
How many humans does it take to pull a platypus from a sewer pipe? About 27 were there when the creature was pulled from a pipe at the Penrith Sewage Treatment Plant in Sydney, Australia.
After Sydney Water staff gently flushed the pipe, it took four National Parks and Wildlife Service rangers to corral the juvenile male in a net before he was whisked away to a vet for a check-up.
Sightings of platypus in Western Sydney are rare, said the NPWS area manager, Jonathan Sanders.
A spokeswoman for the NSW Wildlife Information Rescue and Education Service said there were no records of a platypus rescue in Sydney in the past four years.
But cleaner waterways might be helping the animals to make a comeback, Mr Sanders said.
“It could be that we’re getting a re-colonisation of old habitats.”
Link -via Arbroath, where you can see a video report.
(Image credit: Kate Geraghty)
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Think your job stinks? Just be thankful you’re not a sewer worker in London. Here’s what they had to do recently:
"We’re used to getting our hands dirty, but nothing on this scale," said Danny Brackley, a sewer flusher with Thames Water. "We couldn’t even access the sewer as it was blocked by a 4-foot wall of solid fat."
The fat is the product of Londoners’ "sewer abuse" — using the water system as general garbage disposal. Particularly troublesome is Londoners’ habit of pouring used cooking oil down the sink. Once in the sewer, the oil cools, congeals and then traps other garbage.
Getting at the goo was not easy. Teams of workers, replete with breathing apparatus to protect them from the rancid smell, had to attack the fat with shovels. They then used water cannons to break down the "fatbergs" inside the sewer.
Link (Photo: Stewart Turkington)
If this marriage ends up down the drain, you can’t blame the couple. After all, it did start out in the sewer:
It’s not the most romantic spot for a marriage proposal but it’s one that worked for Steven Sparks – the 41-year-old got down on one knee in front of girlfriend Carolyn Payne during a trip to Victorian sewers.
And the 29-year-old said ‘yes’ in front of her clapping fellow tour-goers despite the unusual surroundings.
‘Anyone can get engaged at the Eiffel Tower or over a candlelit dinner but this was unique,’ said Mr Sparks.
Previously on Neatorama: 14 Romantic Gestures Gone Horribly Wrong
They are clumps of annelid worms, almost certainly tubificids (Naididae, probably genus Tubifex). Normally these occur in soil and sediment, especially at the bottom and edges of polluted streams. In the photo they have apparently entered a pipeline somehow, and in the absence of soil they are coiling around each other.
Read more about annelid worms and see more videos, if you have the stomach for it. Link -via a comment at Digg
