Gobs of grease

There’s an up side and a down side about grease. On the up side, it tastes good. That’s why so many folks love french fries and hamburgers and sweet and sour pork, fried chicken and fried clams and all the rest of the fast food menu.

The down side, apart from the heart danger from a high cholesterol diet, is getting rid of the grease that isn’t consumed. If it accumulates in kitchens or around exhaust vents, it can spread bad smells or even start fires. If it goes down the drain, it can clog sewer lines.

Not as bad around here as in New York, thank you. Many of that city’s 27,000 restaurants skip the messy job of emptying their grease traps. Some don’t have grease traps at all. When the traps are full or nonexistent, the grease goes down the sewer. When it accumulates in slimy chunks, it can block the pipe, back up sewage into people’s basements and sometimes force the discharge of raw sewage into rivers and harbors. New York’s problem is worst in the Long Island section called Flushing, where sewers were blocked 50 times last year. Nationally, the used-grease output is 3 billion pounds annually.

But even here in Eastern Maine, the grease glut sometimes clogs sewers. Most restaurants have grease traps, boxes that hold the oily sludge until someone dips it out and dumps it. Much of the grease in Maine is emptied by a recycling firm in Billerica, Mass., Baker Commodities, which processes the grease and sells it for chicken or animal feed. Baker charges a fee. It hasn’t had to buy the stuff for 15 years.

The process doesn’t always go so smoothly. A sewer pipe in southern Ellsworth, which serves several restaurants, backed up last winter into a private house. Sewage surged up into the toilet and bathtub and flooded onto the floor. A crew from the sewer department dug up the pipe, cleared the blockage, and paid for the cleanup of the bathroom. City Manager Tim King has been cracking down since then, ordering more frequent checking of grease traps.

In Bangor, Mark Marquis, a code enforcement officer, handled three cases last month. One restaurant had been slow to get rid of accumulated grease. Two others showed globs of grease around air vents from the kitchens. One owner was immediately co-operative and cleaned it up. At another place, Mr. Marquis gave the owner an hour to show that he had an appointment with a clean-up firm. If the owner had not complied, Mr. Marquis was prepared to take him to court or close the establishment. His job carries police powers, although he rarely finds need to use them.

It’s a smelly, slippery problem. We are fortunate to have officials like Messrs. King and Marquis on the job to keep it from getting out of hand.