Grease from Thanksgiving dinner causes trouble in pipes, sewers

Grease from Thanksgiving dinner causes trouble in pipes, sewers
(Image credit: iStock)

This Thanksgiving, you might want to put your plumber on speed dial: The grease from the turkey and all the fixings can congeal inside of pipes, clogging up drains and leading to a huge increase in calls for help.

The congealed waste can also get down into the sewer and wreak havoc; in 2013, 62 percent of blockages in the New York City sewer system were caused by grease. And the kitchen isn't the only part of the house affected over the holidays; extra guests means extra showers, which can overwhelm drains, and some folks like to flush things like cotton balls and swabs down the toilet. "Your house kind of has a heart attack," Paul Abrams, a spokesman for Roto Rooter, told Reuters. "All that extra activity is enough to push it over the edge."

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Catherine Garcia, The Week US

Catherine Garcia has worked as a senior writer at The Week since 2014. Her writing and reporting have appeared in Entertainment Weekly, The New York Times, Wirecutter, NBC News and "The Book of Jezebel," among others. She's a graduate of the University of Redlands and the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism.