Stinky springtime for WeHo residents

On a sunny day, springtime in Homewood is the perfect time to step outside, take a fresh breath of air and enjoy the great outdoors.

That is, unless you live near Buffalo Rock and Dean Foods.

Since November 2015, West Homewood residents who live near these facilities have complained about odor issues, comparing the smell to sour milk. Residents began complaining shortly after both the facilities built a new wastewater treatment plant, said Homewood Ward 4 Councilwoman Barry Smith.

“Initially, they didn’t have a treatment plant,” Smith said. “They were putting their waste into the Jefferson County sewer. The problem is they were paying enormous rates because of the volume of BOD (biochemicaloxygen demand) they were producing and putting into the sewer system.”

Over the years, the problem has come and gone. Then in early April, city leaders again received heaps of complaints from West Homewood residents.

It started around Easter, said Sarah Rich, who lives on Fairlane Drive. She celebrated Easter with her family the day before because of the bad weather that was expected on Easter Sunday.

Church services and Easter egg hunts were all canceled because of the pandemic, so Rich decided to have an Easter egg hunt in her backyard.

“We decided we would get dressed up in our Easter outfits, and we would make it exciting,” Rich said. “It was a lovely day. There was a breeze, maybe 65 degrees. But with the breeze, you would catch these whiffs.”

It was a telltale sign that more was to come, Rich said.

“Later, we would take walks, and the kids would say, ‘Ew! It stinks! Why is it stinky?’” she said. “Especially if we walked out away from Buffalo Rock and then we came back. As we came back toward our house, they started to complain about the smell.”

Sandra Wilson, another West Homewood resident, has lived in her house on Saxon Drive since 1991. There weren’t any odor issues, though, until four or five years ago, she said.

“All before then, there was no smell,” she said. “Then all of a sudden, there was this putrid smell. ... It’ll make you sick to your stomach.”

When the odor comes back, she can’t go outside and grill out. She can’t use her pool either, she said.

“You go out there, and you smell this awful smell — it turns your stomach, and you lose your appetite,” Wilson said. “And then you have people that come over, and then there’s this smell, and it’s embarrassing.”

But the recent return of foul odor could have been out of Buffalo Rock’s and Dean Foods’ hands. There were heavy rains in the area in March and April and on Easter Day, and heavy rain can cause an overflow event, said the chief operating officer of Buffalo Rock, Matthew Dent. When these overflow events happen, it affects the Jefferson County sewer system, which treats wastewater from not only Buffalo Rock and Dean Foods but also the Homewood residents.

“When the county has SSO (sanitary sewer overflow) events, it can not handle the overall flow of the system, at which time there are issues,” Dent said.

Buffalo Rock has throughout the years had maintenance issues or services which can cause odor, but when an SSO occurs, it can take days for the overflow to work itself out, Dent said.

“With an SSO event, Mother Nature delivers what she delivers,” Dent said. “If you have six inches of rain and three hours and flash flooding, the flooding goes into the storm sewers. ... The sanitary system gets flooded and therefore can’t handle it.”

One way to handle it would be to increase the capacity, he said. Representatives from the county’s environmental services department presented a plan approximately one year ago for improving this basin’s capacity, Dent said. Under this plan, the sewer main behind Buffalo Rock would be replaced.

“That sewer main is undersized, and it also has areas where they could have some other issues they need to address,” he said. “It was presented to us, we were excited about it, and supposedly the funds were allocated to it.”

Dent said he looks forward to this happening but that he isn’t sure of the county’s timeline.

Residents have also said that they have reported odor issues and discovered that the issues were because the sewer’s carbon filter needed to be replaced. The carbon filter is one part of a complex system, Dent said.

“The carbon, early on, was something we had to replace more often because the system required us to do that,” he said. “As the system improved performance over the years, and we would regularly test that carbon, we would then use that testing to determine when the carbon would need to be replaced.”

The system performance got to a point where it could operate without the carbon, but Dent said Buffalo Rock is committed to keeping the carbon on site in case there are any issues.

There isn’t a clear solution to the odor problem, both Rich and Wilson said. Rich compared her feelings to a neighborhood bully picking on the little kids.

“There is a neighborhood bully, a big kid, and we are the little kids who get picked on,” she said. “Until we finally raise enough fuss so that the neighborhood bully gets into trouble. And then he cleans up his act for a little while and puts on a good face to the moms and dads, and everything is fine. And then when their backs are turned, we start getting picked on again.”

Wilson expressed similar frustrations.“They’re bigger than the average homeowner, and they feel like they can bully their way through,” she said. “That’s my gut feeling. I don’t feel like they’re very friendly to the community — they try to appear to be, but ultimately, they’re the bigger man with the bigger muscle, and they can pretty much do what they want to. We’re tired of it.”

It not only could affect their home values, Rich said, but it also affects residents’ quality of life.

“It’s not fair to my kids that their Easter egg hunt was not only not with their cousins (because of the coronavirus pandemic), but it was with stench,” she said. “That’s not the guest we wanted at our Easter egg hunt, and it’s just not fair.”

At 53 years old, Wilson has lived in Homewood her entire life, and she said she has never thought about living anywhere else — until now.

“I’m not sure I want to stay anymore,” she said. “There’s so many changes and so many issues to deal with. I feel like I’m being pushed out of my comfort zone by things I can’t control.”

The smell has seemed to dissipate for now, but constantly communicating with city leaders to file odor complaints this past spring has worn Wilson down, she said.

“I’ve got things going on in my life too, and I work like everyone else does, and I don’t have the energy to fight them every single day,” she said.

Rich wants all local businesses to do well, she said, and she has no issue with these companies aside from the odor issue.

“I’ve yet to see anyone or talk to anyone from Buffalo Rock,” she said. “No one has come, to my knowledge, to stand in our part of the neighborhood. I would welcome a conversation with them face to face.

“West Homewood is developing its own unique identity. We are not the fanciest part of town, but we take pride in our community, and we have a lot of diversity. We love our school, our park and our neighborhood restaurants and businesses. This just sort of puts a black eye on what we love so much,” Rich said.