News

It was a pants day in Hellidon, Warwickshire when one of our teams was called out to investigate what was causing a sewer problem.

The sewer was blocked and, while the team investigating the issue found a large quantity of sanitary products such as wet wipes there, the actual problem was being caused by a pair of ladies’ undies.

Grant Mitchell, sewer blockages lead, said: “Now we don’t know if someone just didn’t like them and decided to flush them down the toilet, but one thing we do know is that they shouldn’t be in the sewers.

“Our sewers are only designed for paper, pee or poo – anything else, like sanitary products, wipes and especially underwear really shouldn’t be turning up in our sewers and creating problems like this.”

It’s not the first time that we've fished unexpected items out of its sewers, having previously found tennis balls, slipper and even motorcycle parts in the past.

“We’re really lucky that we have such a great network that takes everyone’s waste water away, so it’s really important we look after it. The last thing anyone wants is to have sewage in their home and that could easily happen if the sewers get blocked because someone’s put something they shouldn’t down our the sewers,” said Grant.

We clear over 40,000 blockages every single year, and says it’s a problem that’s causing millions of pounds that could be avoided.

We advise all our customers to bin all fats, oils and greases, and to only flush pee, paper and poo into our network to help prevent blockages and flooding for our customers.

Grant added: “Thankfully our teams were able to remove the underwear – although it’s not a particularly pleasant job – and to get the sewers working properly again before any real problems were caused for our customers.  But this is one ‘brief encounter’ we could have done without.”