(WWJ) It's a yucky problem that's getting worse in Macomb County, where public officials are hoping residents will finally wise up.
Macomb County Public Works Commissioner Candice Miller says people have been perpetually tossing wipes down toilets during the pandemic, and it's causing big problems in the sewer system.
Miller said crews recently cleaned out 270 tons of debris from a pumping station that serves Macomb and parts of Oakland counties.
And local residents, who should know better by now, are responsible.
"We have to send people down into these systems and just cleaning out all of these grates, trying to get these wipe off of them. It is a mess!" Miller told WWJ's Sandra McNeill. "Really, it's a mess!"
"It's been a huge increase since the pandemic," she said, "almost triple or quadruple what we had experienced previously, which was a problem before. It's really gotten much worse."
Miller, who says this is a national problem, for years now has encouraged people to stop flushing disposable wipes because they clog sewer systems, damage the pumps, make pump stations less efficient and can cause sewage backups.
She wants to stress that — despite what labels may say — all kinds of wipes need to be tossed in the trash, and not flushed down the toilet.
"Many of the packages say flushable; they are not," Miller said. "I guess you can, obviously you can flush them, but they're not really flushable because they do not biodegrade in our sewer systems, and it's just wreaking havoc."
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To the northeast, an average of approximately 1,000 pounds of wipes a week was flushed down toilets prior to the COVID-19 pandemic before reaching the Clintondale Pumping Station in Clinton Township, Miller said. A couple of months after COVID-19 resulted in stay-home orders 12 months ago, that average jumped to about 4,000 pounds a week.
From spring 2018 to spring 2020, Miller’s department spent approximately $100,000 to remove two large masses of wipes from the sewer system. In 2018, a 19-ton mass of wipes and accumulated grease that attached to the sewer system was removed.
The gloppy mass was dubbed the Macomb County “Fatberg” and was displayed at the Michigan Science Center in Detroit. In 2019, workers removed a 1-ton mass of wipes that became known as the “Ragball.” It was composed of thousands of wipes that became knotted together in a different section of sewer.