Treatment Plant Getting Less Than A Sweet Reception Smell From Sludge Leaves Post Falls Area Residents Complaining

The windsock, the skunk gauge and the row of manufactured homes immediately next door are constant reminders of Allen Tudor’s most stubborn problem - odor control.

Tudor, the supervisor of Post Falls’ wastewater treatment plant, added a snide phone message as another reminder.

Was the horrid stench from the sewage plant “due to incompetence or embezzling?” the caller asked.

Tudor didn’t return the call. It was only one of about 30 complaint calls a day the plant received recently as workers hauled sludge to area farms.

The semi-annual hauling job was done Monday, but the smell lingered this week as they cleaned the last of the muck from the open-sided polebarn.

“Yesterday it smelled to me like there was a very dead horse right here,” Tudor said, from one corner of the barn Friday.

Residents of the Camelot Estates manufactured home park agree the smell has been bad recently.

“One day during the day it was really awful, like the plant was coming apart,” said resident Gordon McLaren.

“It was probably 50 times worse,” said Jada Tallmadge, a young mother whose back yard looks across to the sludge storage area. “I hope it’s not unhealthy.”

While some city employees blame the problem on the developer of Camelot Estates, who insisted on locating the park there, Tudor said he’s looking for ways to be a better neighbor.

The hauling job usually takes up to four weeks, but this time it was done in little more than a week.

Also, the current $25 million expansion of the plant includes a new headworks building, which will contain odors and scrub the air before releasing it.

The worst of daily odors emanate from vats of concentrated sewage, half eaten by microbes.

The vats are over capacity, so they run inefficiently and produce more of the chemicals that cause smells such as rotten eggs, old cadavers and skunks.

The office jokingly keeps track of the daily odor with a gauge shaped like a skunk. Its tail points to the degree of stench.

“Wind direction and wind speed affects it more than anything else,” Tudor said. Plant workers use an orange wind-sock to tell when the odor is drifting toward Camelot Estates.

This fall, Tudor plans to experiment with composting sludge with yard wastes. If successful, the city could sell the compost, as does Coeur d’Alene and other cities.

That would come none too soon for the residents of Camelot Estates, many of whom were unaware of the sewage plant when they moved in.

“We came out and looked at the lot, and we never smelled it,” McLaren said, a retired resident.

“It’s a shame because we really like it here,” said his wife, Mary Ann. “I hope it’s fixed soon.”

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