London has a major drainage problem, their Victorian sewage system is struggling to cope with the sheer volume of sewage created per year.
The old system was not designed to handle the volume or the misuse of the drainage system and recently a 130-tonne fatberg that blocked a large part of the servers had to be removed from the sewers, this huge drain blockage consisted primarily of fat, wet wipes, and nappies.
The new super sewer will handle 300 Olympic swimming pools’ worth of raw sewage ends up in the Thames. It seems archaic that a modern city such as London still continues to dump raw sewage into its main river.
The sewage is supposed to go through the sewers to a treatments plant, the fact that is woefully inadequate to the modern London demands when it rains the sewers become even more full. So to avoid all our excrement rising up and flooding the streets, whenever there is an overflow they just dump it into the river.
Wide enough to fit three double-decker buses, 20 miles long and running from 40 to 90 meters deep for 20 miles directly beneath the Thames, the Thames Tideway Tunnel is one of the biggest engineering schemes in recent history.
The plan is for the sewage to be transported underneath the river, having all the contaminants removed from it before it reaches the sea.
BBC has done a three-part documentary on the construction of this super sewer following its development the past 3 years.
