Meet the guy with the dirtiest job in New York City.
From headless pigs to car tires and dead rats, there’s no telling what will wash up when sewage treatment worker Kam Lau is on the clock battling fatbergs.
“It’s a dirty job. It took me a while to get used to the smell,” Lau told The Post at Brooklyn’s Newtown Creek Wastewater Treatment Plant.
“I put my gloves on and just do the job. Someone has to do it.”
The 44-year-old Queens man is the city’s first line of defense against its growing crisis with fatbergs: masses of cooking fat and wipes that clog sewage lines and wreak havoc at wastewater facilities.
The city Department of Environmental Protection spent $19 million last year removing fatbergs — a cost that has doubled in the past decade — because New Yorkers won’t stop flushing things they’re not supposed to.
Every day, Lau combs through the feminine hygiene products, used condoms, wipes and dead rats that make their way from city toilets and into Newtown Creek’s million-dollar machinery and pumps.
Sometimes, he finds cash. One day, a headless pig popped up.
“It scared everyone,” said Lau of Long Island City.
Last year, the DEP responded to 2,100 fatbergs in the city’s sewer system. A new awareness campaign warns New Yorkers they’re only supposed to flush the four “Ps”: poop, puke, pee and toilet paper. But they don’t.
The DEP is pointing its finger squarely at flushable wipes, a relatively new hygiene fad which they say makes up 90% of the solids caught in their giant sorting screens at 14 treatment plants around the city.
Traditionally used for babies, wet wipes are now popular with adults too, particularly in the US, which accounts for half of the global $1.1 billion wipe market, according to Bloomberg.
Last year, the DEP sent more than 53,000 tons of these supposedly flushable towelettes and other debris to landfills. Day in, day out, they fill giant industrial-sized dumpsters, which are then carted away by trucks several times a week.
“These wipes are the bane of my existence,” the city’s wastewater boss, Pam Elardo, told The Post. “People want their bums to be fresh. Fine. But put it in the trash.”
Fed-up city officials commissioned a study in September that found none of the major six “flushable” wipes disintegrated as claimed, and now the DEP wants them banned.
Fatbergs are on the rise around the world. In England, a 209-foot-long monster discovered in January took workers eight weeks to remove.
Elardo said the biggest fatberg she’s ever seen was in the state of Washington — and it was larger than she. She named the hulking, yellow mass “the Twinkie.”
“There are so many more things we could spend the $19 million on, like odor control or fixing aging equipment we need to replace. This, to me, is a big waste,” Elardo said.
“We’re doing all we can, but we need help. Given all the right information, I believe New Yorkers will do the right thing.”