London’s ‘wet wipe island’ gets bulldozed in historic Thames clean

LONDON -- Heavy machinery is tearing through what locals are calling “wet wipe island,” an 820-foot shoreline of flushed bathroom debris that has transformed a stretch of London’s Thames River into an environmental nightmare. The clean-up near Hammersmith Bridge in West London represents the United Kingdom’s first attempt to mechanically remove wet wipes from a river and, over the next month, excavators will extract an estimated 180 tons of congealed waste -- equivalent to the weight of 15 double-decker buses spread across an area the size of two tennis courts. “We’re doing the first mass removal of wet wipes that's ever taken place in the country,” Emily McLean, senior technical advisor for the Port of London Authority, which is coordinating the operation, told ABC News. The mechanical in