Revealed: The Weird Items Blocking Yorkshire's Sewers
False teeth, a cow and live ammunition: just some of the weird items that don't belong in Yorkshire's sewers, but somehow ended up there anyway.
“The most exciting thing we’ve found while I’ve been at the company was a handgun,” says Yorkshire Water networks and treatment manager James Harrison.
“We’ve also found all manner of pets. And traffic cones are a real pain.
“The strangest thing that our guys have found has got to be the time they found a cow blocking the sewer. So we had to turn up and have that removed.”
It comes as Yorkshire Water launches its ‘Stop it, don't block it campaign', to reduce the number of sewer blockages in Leeds.
Yeadon in particular is apparently a hotspot for residents flushing wipes down the toilet and pouring fat down the kitchen sink.
In the last year alone, Yorkshire Water cleared 35,000 blockages from sewers across the region, nearly a third of which were caused by wipes. A further 15 per cent were down to fats, oils and grease being put down sinks.
“We spend a lot of money removing these blockages,” says James.
“And if there’s a blockage on the private pipe of a customer, they’d have to pay for it.
“You can have area flooding, pollution, and internal flooding of customer’s properties.”