Yuck! Monsters of Gympie's underground

They're out there and they're real

A fatburg at Gympie Regional Council sewage treatment plant this week. Picture: Contributed

GYMPIE has joined the rest of the world in growing and harbouring monstrous piles of congealed, unflushable rubbish in its waterways.

Endearingly coined "fatbergs” and consisting mainly of flushed baby wipes held together with fat and things nobody wants to think about, these masses of unwanted "ick” are causing headaches at the Gympie Regional Council sewage treatment plant which has provided photos following the latest offensive this week (see front page).

With at least one blockage a week in the Gympie region, council water executive manager Moira Zeilinga estimates the local authority removes 400l of baby wipes per blockage.

While it's a drop in the sewerage system compared to the mother of all fatbergs, which was the size of a double-decker bus and took 10 days to heave out of the London system, the smaller Gympie spawn are still leaving their smelly mark.

Each incident is costing between $200 and $500 a week to clean up, the Gympie Regional Council confirmed, but the real problem is the environmental hazard.

Reams of flushed baby wipes are causing pump failures and pipe blockages and lead to raw sewage overflowing on to customer properties and into natural waterways where, if undetected, they can kill fish.

Ms Zeilinga said the clean-up entails manually removing the fatbergs with the help of high pressure water cleaners.

A Sunshine Coast fatberg - a congealed lump of fat, sanitary items, wet wipes clogging up our sewage system. Picture: ROXANNE MCCARTY-O'KANE

It includes sucking up and removing liquid sewage, manually collecting solids and disinfecting and flushing the area.

Screens at the inlet also capture baby wipes and rags, but these often need to be removed manually as well.

The process costs the council around $10,000 a year in operating costs of the maintenance equipment and increased electrical costs for pumping and removal.

The message is simple: don't flush what you shouldn't. And according to council that's anything but the three Ps (toilet paper, poos and pees).

Water Services Association of Australia executive director Adam Lovell said the problem is nation-wide.

"Fatbergs are horrible,” he said.

"You've got to rip up roads, you've got to rip out footpaths and parks to get these things out. They're certainly not the most pleasant thing to look at and not the most pleasant thing to smell either.”