A giant fatberg, potentially the size of four Sydney buses, within Sydney Water’s Malabar deepwater ocean sewer has been identified as the likely source of the debris balls that washed up on Sydney beaches a year ago.
Sydney Water isn’t sure exactly how big the fatberg is because it can’t easily access where it has accumulated.
Fixing the problem would require shutting down the outfall – which reaches 2.3km offshore – for maintenance and diverting sewage to “cliff face discharge”, which would close Sydney’s beaches “for months”, a secret report obtained by Guardian Australia states.
“The working hypothesis is FOG [fats, oils and grease] accumulation in an inaccessible dead zone between the Malabar bulkhead door and the decline tunnel has potentially led to sloughing events, releasing debris balls,” the report concludes.
“This chamber was not designed for routine maintenance and can only be accessed by taking the DOOF offline and diverting effluent to the cliff face for an extended period (months), which would close Sydney beaches.”
Have they called Bruce?
It sounds like they need to call Bruce. Where would you rather be?
The headline
They dump it into the ocean and are surprised when it comes back to the beach.
What a thing to read as I went to take my first bite of the day.
Breakfast has been postponed.
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Funny how humans put this shit into the ocean, and the ocean spits it back out. I think there’s something in that for all of us.
A modern western city that dumps fucking raw sewage directly into the ocean. Embarrassing.
Yeah. We are an arrogant, fucked up species.
Unlike most cities, Sydney only does primary treatment of its sewage – straining out the solids. Elsewhere, secondary treatment uses settlement tanks and disinfection techniques before releasing the wastewater or recycling it.
Singapore, for example, treats its sewage to such a high level that it can be reused in the drinking water system.
This is highly misleading. Even if you can get drinking water out of sewage, most of it is disposed somewhere. Sidney might be doing a shit (pun intended) process, but there’s no magic way too turn it all into water.
Wichita Falls, Texas actually piped their treated sewage outflow directly into their treatment plants for a short while because if a drought. Usually it gets dumped in a river after treatment but they were running out of water.
https://practical.engineering/blog/2025/6/17/how-sewage-recycling-works
This is the second interesting thing I’ve read about Wichita Falls (there aren’t many). The other is that it’s the home of the “World’s littlest Skyscraper”. Last I checked there was a furniture store there.
Edit: I dropped this]
That’s the kinda stuff I enjoy reading, thank you for sharing.
Vienna, too, is known for its pure waste water. The output into the Danube river is tap water quality.
Citation needed.
I highly doubt that. There would be absolutely no reason to clean the water up to tap water quality and then discharge it into the river, instead of using it as tap water. That’s just not economically feasible.
I know a part of the Danube near Vienna is a valuable nature reserve, but even then tap water quality is not necessary.
If you have a source that proves your claim, I’d be highly interested to learn why and how they do that. I have a degree in environmental engineering, and I want to know when I’m wrong about something like this.
Not my circus or my monkeys, but I can’t sleep so I did some cursory searching. I did undergrad research that was heavy into wastewater treatment, so this did sound a bit unlikely.
I found the biological secondary is pretty extensive and is being well utilized for energy generation, so the resultant level of treatment makes more sense. It looks like the claim is closer to “you could drink it if you wanted to, but don’t”.
https://www.wte.de/en/references/wastewater-treatment-vienna-austria/
And that’s partly my point.
“Safe to drink” means: you can drink this and not immediately die or get sick/poisoned from it.
“Drinking water quality” means: if you drink nothing but this water for your whole life, it won’t harm you. (as far as our scientific understanding goes)
That’s a bit of a gap.
Singapore
Nice that the article is trying to make it sound like such solutions are from ‘other countries’
Meanwhile, we have full treatment in South Australia and the outflow water is used for watering gardens.
As a fellow South Australian, I had the same thought. This is NOT an Australian issue, this is a Sydney issue.
‘Sydney is a hole’ is factually accurate.
Facturate. We should coin that term for when something is extra accurate.
I did a sewage treatment plant tour in my high school biology class. At the end of the second stage filtration, the worker pointed at how it discharges into the ocean.
“So at this point, the water has been treated enough that it’s safe to drink”
We all scrunched our faces at that. Then he added
“But I wouldn’t”
You really should not.
Waste water treatment, in order to reach human consumption grade, undergoes several stages of treatment.
- preliminary
Removes solids, largely unsoluble, be it organic or inorganic
- primary
Forced oxygenization, to activate micro organism capable of digesting the organic matter present. This stage is the most crucial for the entire process.
- secondary
Waters are allowed to settle, in order to separate solids, now highly rich organic mud, from the water, in large pools or tanks, that are continually fed. Entering water displaces already clarified and mostly depleted of oxygen water, which can safely be returned to nature.
- terciary
Previously clarified water undergoes UV treatment and/or has added minute quantities of sodium hypochlorite, for disinfection purposes. Microfiltering can be added subsequently.
This water is safe for use in street cleaning, irrigation, industrial uses, fire fighting, etc.
- quarternary
Obligatory microfiltering, followed by reverse osmosis process, to remove heavy metals and trace chemicals, followed by filtering through activated charcoal filters. Mineral (sand and rock) filters are then used to give back minerals to the water, to give it an organoleptic profile.
Stabilization of pH and final clarification can be done, before being reintroduced to the supply network.
The whole world should be doing it this way simply because if fresh water sources are being used for potable water, it’s likely that same source is being used to to discard the so-called treated sewage water … which is then taken up and distributed as potable water (with disenfectants added).
Thing is if you don’t use the reverse osmosis stage your community is drinking water that is contaminated with every drug (legal and illegal) that people have peed out.
Studies have shown fish in the Great Lakes - which are used both for returned treated sewage and drinking water - are being affected by some of those drugs (especially the ones that affect hormones).
Hells Bells, I knew. Hells Belle… Glad to meet you.
The issue with sanitation is that it consumes resources, and a good amount of if, in a very short time. And planning and putting it down requires specialized, skilled, work, which costs a lot of money. And maintain and operate it returns a permanent cost.
Politians are not willing to do this and are mostly uncapable of explaining why this should be done. It also does not help most people being completely ignorant or uncaring for ecological impact, unless it comes back to bite their behind.
Waste water management is crucial and it is a source of resources, water only being the first.
Muds can be harvested for digestion, in order to produce methane for generating electricity. Depending on the scale, it can be used to power the plant alone or to inject into the wide power grid.
Digested muds can be further processed by composting and then be funneled towards agriculture and forestry.
Fats can be harvested, purified and transformed into soaps, creams and industrial lubricants. Extremely well purified fats can even be converted to fuel or even added to feeds.
Going green is necessary and extremely profitable.
If enough ambition is put in place, fully organic treatments can be put in place and wild life can be made part, by default, of treating waste waters and fish, water fowls and even plants with secondary uses can be introduced to create another value chain.
However, to kickstart all of this, it is necessary to make people aware that water, regardless carrying waste, is still water and, as such, is precious.
How do you know so much about waste water treatment and why are you so optimistic about what could be done?
I’ve got a relevant university degree, and I’m way less optimistic about most of these topics.
For example:
Muds can be harvested for digestion, in order to produce methane for generating electricity. Depending on the scale, it can be used to power the plant alone or to inject into the wide power grid.
This is usually not a net gain. Wastewater treatment plans consume more energy than can be harvested from the wastewater. The only WWTP I know that claims to produce more than they require for operation can only do so, because they accept additional organic material from a nearby slaughterhouse into their sludge fermentation stage, which is a bit of a cheat.
The same plant is btw also burning their treated sludge because it contains too many pollutants to be used in agriculture.
I work in the field and some units can in fact produce enough gas to self sustain operation. It is about choosing the right process and the adequate machinery.
Newer systems, with SBRs, do tend to produce a lot less muds. Older systems, like the one I spend more time on, produces a great deal more of muds.
A midsize city around where I live is currently undergoing viability studies to implement a digestor. They are trucking off-site 30 metric tons of dehydrated muds for composting every two or three days. If the muds could be digested first, they could cut back a good deal on the energy bill.
Other places are installing solar panel arrays and considering batteries next.
You would be amazed how often “the solution to pollution is dilution”. Can’t dump that raw chemical into the water/sewer, oh no. But if you dilute it with 5000 gallons of water? Oh well now it’s at “acceptable levels”. Notice how most regulations talk about “parts per million”(PPM). Well, it turns out that when most of your regulations are written such that you only have to “properly dispose” of something if it’s above a certain concentration, you can just dilute it below that level and BAM, “safe to dispose of”.
Well, yes. Dumping high concentrations will instantly kill everything in the waterway, diluting them and doing it slowly means they can handle it and survived.
Heck, the ocean is full of salt, but if you started dumping high-concentrated brine off a beach you’d kill every animal and plant on sight, just as you would kill yourself drinking said brine. But it would be quite hard to argue that you can’t safely put salt in the ocean, or add some to your food, once it is diluted to a safe level.
The question is how much of something total can the ocean handle before it becomes a problem. And for many things the answer is, quite literally, that it is just a drop in the ocean.
Yeah I get the point. But it doesn’t do anything about breaking those chemicals down or actually removing them. They just build up in the ocean instead. And then eventually you have rivers ON FIRE and you have to create the EPA.
Technically, you could mix 100 “toxic” chemicals into a soup where each one is below its PPM and that would be considered “safe”.
It’s like telling everyone they can only pee a little bit into the pool. Just a little bit won’t hurt, right? But if everyone’s doing it, eventually you have a pool of piss.
And frankly, I don’t trust humans for shit when it comes to long term impacts. We are short-sighted AS FUCK. There is no reason to believe dumping waste into the ocean isn’t eventually going to fuck something up. Oh look, it happened in this very article!
It’s just retarded homeopathy nonsense to think dilution removes the chemical. It’s still there. Just in our oceans now.
“It’s outside the environment”
There’s nothing out there
all there is is sea, and birds, and fish…
…and 20000 tonnes of crude oil…
…and a fire
this is much more common than you think
I’m hoping it’s not RAW sewage
It is. Sydney only does “primary treatment” which is literally running it through a strainer to separate the big chunks, and then they just dump it.
JPEG sewage
This compression is shit.
I wouldn’t want it cooked as well
What about skinny dung beetles?
oh my what did I even read
An article about your mom.
HAH!
You got that poo ball.
FatbergBirthingPooBalls is actually a fantastic username.
You would think so, wouldn’t you.
I literally just said so.
did…did you pick your name from any article that we can…uh…read? Nvm…
How can you design a system and think that not allowing any maintenance of this section is a good idea?!
I’m certain a lot of people raised the same question during construction, and the answer was definately “it’ll be too expensive”.
As long as capital is the foremost concern, sensibility, sustainability and common good will never be. Can never be.
Everything needs to change before that becomes an option. A revolution has to happen, on a large enough scale to change that.
Funny story there (well, not “haha” funny). I recently finished my bachelors in Architectual Technologies and Construction Management in Denmark. The exam for this bachelors is defending a project you’ve worked on for 4-ish months. It’s a construction project, where you alone have to design a building of a decent size while making sure you don’t break a bunch of laws or building codes. My exam was a catastrophe. Part of what made it so incredibly bad, was that I insisted on making a building that was good for the end-user. Unfortunately, part of our building codes here in Denmark is that we have to build a building that is good for the customer, not the end-user. This meant that I went directly against code, by e.g. soundproofing the building better than the nationally agreed minimum soundproofing, because that would be more expensive for the customer, or by insulating the building more than legally required, because we live in fucking Denmark, and heating of a building is a big environmental factor.
According to our codes (apparently), you have to only ever do the absolutely legal minimum when designing a construction project, unless the customer has expressly stated otherwise, because if not, you’re not securing your customer’s interest. So in other words, the quality of the building isn’t important, only the cost of it.
Do you not interact with your customer? As a software engineer, it’s part of my job to sell the project manager or customer on details they haven’t thought of or may not fully understand
In a real life scenario, I interact with customers on a daily basis, but I’m further along the chain in the construction process, and don’t deal with design in any way. However, the exam was a completely fictional scenario with a fictional construction project, so no customer to talk to. The examiners decided they didn’t care much for sound proofing, and didn’t care for my reasoning.
That’s rage inducing!
Fixing the problem would require shutting down the outfall – which reaches 2.3km offshore – for maintenance and diverting sewage to “cliff face discharge”, which would close Sydney’s beaches “for months”
“Cleaning up the massive rancid fat lump on the beach would be too much work, so we’re just not gonna. It would inconvenience beach goers.”
That’s not quite it. The wastewater treatment plant is located high up on the cliffs above the ocean. It has a big pipe that they tunneled through bedrock so it discharges at the bottom of the ocean 2.3km from shore. The fatberg is in the junction between the plant and the pipe. To clean it out, they’d have to stop using the big drain pipe, and y’know, just dump sewage off the edge of the cliff into the ocean, pretty much right onto the beach.
Oh, I got the impression it was just… Floating there right out in the ocean.
How the fuck is this not an engineering problem they must have foreseen? I mean now what, the pipes just stay clogged? What a literal shitfest.
IKR? The need for maintenance eventually should be foreseen! If they went to all the trouble to put a pipe through bedrock, why not put 2 pipes, so there’s a backup?
The need for maintenance is forseen, but it’s generally deferred. There was probably a plan to do something every year or two, but they weren’t willing to shut the beach down for a week or so. A second pipe would be absurdly expensive.
I want to hear FriendlyJordies take on this. I bet it’s going to end up being a case of low bid mafia-connected contractors building the damn thing.
Jaws but with a fatberg instead of a shark
“Titanic and The Aquatic Mountain of Lard”
Makes me think, maybe we could weigh it down so it falls to the bottom of the sea, and then all those weird eels and bizarro sharks would munch it up. The recycle of life.
Maybe they can mine it…and turn it into luxury soap…that’s what I learned from survival games at least.
I like your drive! …So I looked it up. First off, you can’t. Because that’s not a thing that is done. Second off, you can’t. Because it isn’t yours to keep. Even if you wanted to and offered to take care of it, it’s a maritime thing and technically it belongs to the state. Let me break it down for you with this imaginary, but realistic, exchange:
“We are not going to remove the rancid fat berg. It’s too expensive.”
“Oh. Ok. Can I take it?”
“NO! IT’S MINE!”
OOOO I’ll save this in my bag for later
Trump loves having big things named after him.
Kinda like the garbage dump named Mt. Cleese in honour of John Cleese.
I would support naming awful things after Trump, but I want to forget about that fucker as quickly as possible.
Then maybe bury him under the fatberg, then name it after him?
but I want to forget about that fucker as quickly as possible
You are not alone in that.
The year has only started, but Anne Davies is already the lead contender and favourite for 2026’s best article headline.
The year went to shit surprisingly early
The state of the planet:
Since olden 4chan (rip) days Australians have always been top of the heap when it came to shit posting. If anyone could make a giant poopy fatberg it’s them.
