News

It was a frustrating day in Cheltenham when a team was called out to investigate what was causing a problem at our Hayden sewage treatment works.

When emptying out the skips where all of the wipes and other things that shouldn’t be flushed end up, the team found a pair of jogging bottoms which had been caught by the screens.

Grant Mitchell, sewer blockages lead, said: “Now we don’t know if someone got a new pair of joggers and needed to get rid of old ones 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 clothing should be put into the bin.  Jogging bottoms 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 our sewers, having previously found tennis balls, women’s underwear 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 a sewage in their home and that could happen if the sewers get blocked because someone’s put something they shouldn’t down our the sewers,” said Grant.

We clear around 45,000 blockages every single year, and 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 jogging bottoms – although it’s not a particularly pleasant job – before any real problems were caused for our customers, but we’d like to tell whoever did this to ‘jog on’!”