Long Island residents confined to their homes amid social-distancing rules have been clogging sewers by flushing socks, gloves and other “fibruous materials” down their toilets, a report said Thursday.
The Nassau County residents have backed up sewage-treatment plants with the materials, which bind together in pipes and arrive at the plants in large balls, Newsday reported.
The rag block-ups account for a significant amount of the clogs in the county this year, according to the report.
The pileups accounted for 48 percent of the sewage clogs between Jan. 1 and March 31, the newspaper reported.
In the past three years, rag block-ups caused between 11 and 17 percent of the pileups.
“It could be the cleaning materials now that everybody’s wanting to disinfect their houses,” Vincent Desiderio, the maintenance manager for Suez North America, the company that operates Nassau’s sewer system, told Newsday.
“When you start pulling socks out of a pump, that’s pretty surprising, because usually you shouldn’t see that in a sewer system,” he added. “It will stop a pump.”