Raising a stink

This was the issue that no one expected would take so long to resolve.

When residents first came to the Homewood City Council’s special issues committee in October 2015 with complaints of persistent terrible odor in West Homewood, they didn’t have an inkling that they would still be talking about it after that council’s term ended and almost a year into the new term.

“We have made progress. It has been much, much slower than anyone really wanted,” said Ward 2 Rep. Mike Higginbotham, who took office in November 2016. “When this whole issue began, I was not on the council.”

The challenge partly came from difficulty in finding the source of the stink, which ultimately required the council to hire an outside firm, Volatile Analysis. Then, fix after fix on the part of the Barber Dairy and Buffalo Rock plants, as well as Jefferson County’s sewer department, seemed to provide only intermittent relief.

Two years later, there are fewer odor complaints, but the fact that it still lingers irks residents.

“The neighborhood is frustrated,” said Erik Henninger, who helped with some of the early neighborhood organization efforts around the odor issue, including a “stink map” for people to track odor occurrences. “As we organize, I think that’s a good thing because people say ‘It’s not just me having this problem.’ … Hopefully, it’s empowering for people to show up and voice their concerns together.”

Higginbotham added: “It’s not surprising that residents have become increasingly frustrated. It’s not an acceptable situation.”

The work that has been done in attempts to combat the odor includes fixes to manhole covers in Jefferson County sewers, and both Barber and Buffalo Rock hired outside consultant firms in an attempt to track down failures in their odor control measures within their plants.

“I’ve learned far more about how wastewater treatment plants control smells and release them than I ever thought I would know,” Higginbotham said.

Dean Foods, which owns Barber Dairy, provided The Homewood Star a list of its odor abatement projects since the neighborhood complaints started. These included: a new ionization system to pre-treat air before going through carbon scrubbers, completed in early 2016; a roof replacement on the pre-treatment facility, completed in August 2017; new carbon scrubbers on two dehumidifiers and additional interior ductwork; and a new carbon blend better at removing “volatile organic acids,” believed to be an odor source, from the air. 

The list Dean Foods provided also included plans to improve insulation of the pre-treatment building by the end of the year and add a new dehumidifier with carbon scrubber in 2018.

Buffalo Rock Chief Operating Officer Matthew Dent said Buffalo Rock has had a similar laundry list of projects to better handle wastewater at its plant, as well as hosting community meetings multiple times since October 2015. 

Its plant also had issues with noise and light affecting neighbors. Though there were some unexpected issues and equipment failures along the way, Dent said Buffalo Rock is almost done with its odor, noise and light management projects.

“I’m confident where we are today in the progress we’ve made,” Dent said. “From Buffalo Rock specifically, we are committing to address any and everything that we have ownership of.”

Buffalo Rock listed about 20 projects that have been completed to block noise, light and odor from leaving its campus and affecting the neighborhood. 

These have included enclosing parts of the facility, installing new equipment, building new walls to block noise, rearranging the campus to move noise-producers farther from homes and creating more ways to test for possible odor leaks, using everything from pressure gauges to employee “sniff tests.”

Buffalo Rock has also arranged for St. Croix Sensory to conduct odor testing again in November and is planning to test a Dissolved Air Flotation (DAF) device to reduce oil and grease levels in wastewater, as well as help eliminate some of the chemicals believed to be the odor source. After the DAF testing, Buffalo Rock plans to bring a fourth reactor tank online for its wastewater treatment facility to function more efficiently. 

Dent said part of their process is creating redundancies so equipment failures are less likely to occur and can be addressed quickly when they occur, such as buying a backup blower when they bought and installed anew one.

“Failures are going to happen, but the question is how fast can we deal with them and which ones can we prevent,” Dent said. “We’ve worked to address those in a way that can be sustained long-term.”

While residents have been showing up month after month for the past two years, Dent said odor issues in the area of the plants have been a problem for at least 10 years — and some reported odors, he said, were too far away to be caused by either plant. Even with the projects Barber and Buffalo Rock undertook, Dent said he’s not confident that this will be the end of the stink in West Homewood.

“They’ve dealt with odor issues in West Homewood for over a decade,” Dent said. “We are confident that it’s going to be here when all our action steps are complete. I’m not proud to say that, but it’s a reality.”

The council is taking a new step toward looking at odor as a long-term issue. With the help of Volatile Analysis, the council is in the process of drafting a new ordinance that would give the city a more concrete way to define unacceptable odors, as well as an official response toward violations.

As of The Homewood Star’s press time, the odor ordinance had been submitted to council members for review but had not been discussed in a public meeting. 

Henninger was optimistic about the possibilities of a new ordinance.

“I think that’s great. Sometimes it takes an event like this to help us realize where we have some gaps in our regulations,” he said. 

West Homewood resident Charlie Treadaway, however, didn’t share the optimism. Though he said he feels better about the situation than he did a year ago, he doesn’t feel a city ordinance will do enough to provide accountability.

“There’s parking ordinances in Homewood but people still break the ordinances,” Treadaway said. “If they break it, they’re just going to pay the fine. Corporations like that, unless you’re really dinging their bottom line, it’s not going to help.”

Higginbotham said he didn’t want to comment on the ordinance’s specifics until it was further along in the drafting process, but he generally encouraged proactivity on both the council and neighborhood’s parts.

“I think we’ve made progress, but we don’t need to get complacent. We need to keep in mind that these things could change at any time,” Higginbotham said. “If people are having problems, they need to speak up now. They need to make us aware of it.”

Follow thehomewoodstar.com for updates on the odor ordinance.