Where ever you're listening to this right now, probably very likely beneath you, there

is a whole subterranean world going on.

The sewer underneath our streets and our feet is a vast labyrinth.

Water rushes through these dark pipes, some of them big enough to hold elephants and

whales, and every time you flush your toilet or wash your dishes, whatever's in there,

the water, the poop, the food scraps, the hair, the toilet paper, it all spins down your

drain and gets spit out into this mysterious underground highway.

It just gets taken care of, it disappears.

Unless perhaps, it meets something sinister along the way, waiting in the dark, something

that swallows the walls of the sewer, something buttery yellow and glossy, it's sickly smelling.

What is a fatberg?

Yeah, I love this question, well, I think fatbergs have kind of accumulated this

reputation for being almost sentient, you know, like monstrous behemoths underground.

I guess I have contributed to this by running stories with illustrations of fatbergs that

have gaping moths and eyes.

I'm going through this, and this is Atlas Obscura, celebration of the world's strange,

incredible and wondrous places.

Today, Radar Jessica Lee Hester joins us on a deep dive into the sewer, the subject

of her new book.

We'll talk about some of the interesting and truly disgusting things that she discovered

there, more after this.

What is a fatberg?

...