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A toy car, a dog bowl and a traffic cone – these are just some of the strangest and unexpected items South West Water’s teams came across while inspecting the region’s sewers in 2025.

Also among the discoveries were a trolley wheel that had clearly gone the wrong way, a hand brush which had taken an unexpected detour, a football that missed its goal, and even a tyre that made its way underground – a collection of bizarre finds that raised more than a few eyebrows.

Spotted during routine inspections by South West Water’s teams, with many highlighted using new AI-assisted analysis of CCTV footage, these unusual items left teams wondering how such an unusual mix of objects ended up making their way beneath our streets.

While operators are used to dealing with everyday culprits such as wet wipes, fats, oils and greases blocking the sewers, these discoveries were a little harder to explain!

Throughout 2025, South West Water piloted advanced AI technology to improve sewer inspections across its network, helping teams review footage more efficiently and flag unusual items more quickly.

Traditionally, teams use specialised CCTV cameras lowered into pipes to record thousands of hours of footage, which technicians and office staff then manually reviewed to locate faults, structural issues, and blockages.

In 2025, this process was enhanced by AI systems trained to automatically label and highlight objects and anomalies in the footage, reducing manual effort and helping teams identify unusual finds and potential problems sooner.

Training the AI involves processing tens of thousands of images from the network. These images teach the system what typical sewer conditions look like, as well as the many variations of faults an operator might encounter.

A serious message

Behind these strange discoveries is a serious message.

Blockages caused by inappropriate items in the sewer can lead to wastewater backing up into homes and gardens, damage to infrastructure, and environmental pollution to local watercourses and seas. It can cause flooding in streets, roads, and other public spaces, especially during wet weather.

In the last year, South West Water has cleared around 7,000 avoidable blockages from its net-work, working 24 hours a day to keep our sewers flowing.

However, all of these blockages could be prevented with a little more care about what goes down the loo or sink and especially down the drains.

Andy Pettifer, Wastewater Operations Manager at South West Water, said: “Finding a toy car or a football in a sewer might raise a few eyebrows, but it’s a serious issue that our teams are facing each year.

“Our sewers are designed for wastewater only, and anything else can cause blockages that affect homes, businesses, and the environment. So please, only flush the three P’s and if it’s not pee, poo or paper, please put it in the bin or dispose of your waste responsibility.”

To do so, CHANGE-seq-BE starts with a whole genome, but instead of immediately sequencing it, scientists split the genome into tiny circles of DNA. They then take those circles and expose them to the base editor being tested. Afterward, they treat the DNA with a special enzyme that detects if base editing occurred, opening those — and only those — DNA circles with evidence of base editing into linear strands. The linear strands of DNA are then selectively sequenced, requiring far fewer resources than competing techniques. They optimized it for both major types of base editors (adenine and cytosine base editors). After developing the method, the scientists wanted to know if it truly was both more comprehensive and resource-efficient than conventional approaches, so they tested them head-to-head.

“When we directly compared it to other methods, CHANGE-seq-BE found almost all sites nominated by those methods, as well as many that it was exclusively able to detect,” Tsai said. “We showed that this unbiased approach was more sensitive while using only about 5% of the sequencing reads.”

Given the technique’s sensitivity, ease of use and efficient resource utilization, others have already begun adopting it. Full experimental protocols and software to enable CHANGE-seq-BE are described in the study, enabling this adoption. For example, in addition to the clinical application reported in the paper, clinical trials at St. Jude and beyond have integrated the technique into their planning, using it as a safety and efficiency evaluation tool. CHANGE-seq-BE was also recently used to characterize the first patient-specific in vivo genome editing treatment. Fundamental research labs investigating base editing have also begun using it to test for off-targets early in their process, better identifying the most promising approaches to pursue than existing screens. These early adopters show the technique’s appeal to researchers and clinicians alike, and its promise to push forward the future of base editing.

“We’ve enabled those developing these therapies to quickly understand and find the base editors with the highest potential activity and specificity,” Tsai said. “We hope that methods like CHANGE-seq-BE will open the door toward more genome editing therapies being developed for and reaching the patients who need them.”

Authors and funding

The study’s co-first authors are Cicera Lazzarotto, formerly of St. Jude; and Varun Katta, St. Jude. The study’s other authors are Yichao Li, Garret Manquen, Rachael Wood, Jacqueline Chyr and Azusa Matsubara, St. Jude; Elizabeth Urbina and GaHyun Lee, formerly of St. Jude; Xiaolin Wu, Frederick National Laboratory of Cancer Research; and Suk See De Ravin, National Institutes of Health.

The study was supported by grants from the National Institutes of Health Somatic Cell Genome Editing Consortium Program through National Institutes of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (U01AI176470 and U01AI176471), National Heart Lung and Blood Institute (U01HL163983), St. Jude Collaborative Research Consortium on Novel Gene Therapies for Sickle Cell Disease, St. Jude PARADIGM Blue Sky Project, the Doris Duke Charitable Foundation (2020154) and the American Lebanese Syrian Associated Charities (ALSAC), the fundraising and awareness organization of St. Jude.