Town Raises a Stink Over Sewage Odors

Some people say the smell reminds them of raw fish, rotten eggs or, inexplicably, licorice.

But most of the time, when a northwesterly wind wafts across the Capistrano Beach Sanitary District plant, across a small shopping center and over the Beachwood Park & Village Mobile Home Park in Capistrano Beach, there is no mistaking the smell: It’s raw sewage.

People who have lived and worked near the 30-year-old sanitary plant say that, for years, there have been good days when air was clean and bad days when the air was foul--and no one in the seaside community could smell the sea.

But for the last six weeks, Capistrano Beach residents have said the stench has been especially dreadful. The sanitation district has been cleaning an old treatment tank called a “digester” for the first time in 15 years.

During the cleaning, the district dug three large holding ponds in a nearby field and scooped into them the pungent muck from the digester. District officials said they knew the uncovered ponds would smell and tried to mask the odor by mixing chemicals and dirt into the waste.

Tried to Retreat Indoors

If the chemicals were supposed to block the odor, they have not worked, angry Capistrano Beach residents have said.

Since early May, people with air conditioning said they have tried to retreat indoors when the wind blows from the plant.

Still, they complain of frequent headaches, worsening sinus conditions and nausea.

“It’s been sickening around here lately,” said gardener John Winterbottom, 41, who lives in a mobile home. “Five days a week you can’t even go out in your backyard for an hour and sit in the sun. It smells like a cesspool.”

Michelle Manley, a cashier at a Capistrano Beach meat and seafood market called Willie’s Meats, said: “The smell kind of gets worse as the day gets on. Afternoons it’s worse. A lot of people think that’s the smell of the fish. It’s not. But it turns people off.”

Last week, two regulatory agencies joined Capistrano Beach residents in harsh criticism of the the small and poorly funded district, which treats sewage from 3,500 homes in Capistrano Beach and Dana Point.

Declaring that the plant’s odors have created “an ongoing public nuisance,” the South Coast Air Quality Management District (AQMD) on Wednesday announced plans to lift the sewer district’s operating permit, probably by Monday.

As a practical matter, AQMD officials said, they would not shut down the plant. Instead, they threatened to levy fines of up to $50,000 for each day it fouls the air after the permit is revoked.

The small district is also facing an inquiry Monday by the San Diego Regional Water Quality Board.

Cited the District

The board on May 8 cited the district for creating “extremely obnoxious sewage odors,” said David Barker, the board’s senior engineer. Now the board wants Ray Mattocks, the sewer district’s general manager, to explain at a public hearing Monday why the smells have continued.

“It’s not a normal state of affairs for a sewage treatment plant to cause obnoxious odors beyond the treatment (area) at the plant,” Barker said. “We do not consider the odors as being unavoidable. Other treatment plants clean their digesters without this problem.”

Barker described the board’s interest as “initial fact-gathering at the moment,” but said it could lead to formal enforcement action.

Sanitary district officials said they believe the odor from the Capistrano Beach plant should end by early next week when the sewage is removed from the temporary ponds, mixed with dirt and hauled to the county dump.

No Second Digester

Board members added that they were sorry their plant had created odors in the neighborhood but said they were unable to clean the digester any other way.

The problem, officials said, was that the sanitary district does not own a second digester to hold sewage while the first is cleaned. Board members said they had to scoop the waste out of the tank using a clamshell bucket at the end of a crane and then dump the stuff into the holding ponds.

“We knew we were going to get some odor” from the uncovered ponds, board member David Buxton said. “We expected we could control it with chemicals. So obviously we didn’t do it right.”

One muggy afternoon late last week, the air was thick with the sharp smell of sewage as Buxton showed two visitors around the aging sewer plant.

The digester, a concrete-walled tank about three stories high, was empty. Buxton said the machinery for the digesters should be reinstalled soon.

Can’t Afford Fines

Not far from the tank, a bulldozer was busily scooping liquid sewage out of the ponds and mixing in more dirt so that waiting trucks could take it to the county dump. The ponds, the source of stench, should be empty by Tuesday, Buxton said.

Officials said their small district, which operates on a budget of $400,000 a year, has just spent $150,000 renovating and cleaning its digester and could not afford any fines that may be levied.

Neighboring sewage treatment plant officials had just spent $5 million to stop odors, but, Buxton said: “We don’t have $5 million. We don’t even have $1 million. If we are fined $50,000 a day, we’d last six days (before going bankrupt).”

District officials said they know that they probably need to replace the aging plant at a cost of about $5 million but that local voters would have to approve a bond issue.

“Our problem is more a lack of funds than mismanagement,” said Ray Lewis, a consulting engineer to the district. He said district customers pay just $10 a month in sewage treatment fees. Neighboring agencies charge $15.40 to $27 a month.

‘A Song and Dance’

Capistrano Beach residents have not been impressed by the district’s claims of poverty.

Sheriden Eitel, a resident of the Beachwood mobile home park, said district officials have repeatedly given residents “a song and dance” about the source of the odors and how they were being abated

Eitel, 49, was one of 75 Capistrano Beach residents who, wearing gas masks and surgical masks, attended the Sanitary District’s board meeting last week to protest the smell.

A quiet-spoken man who runs a small manufacturing firm in Capistrano Beach, Eitel said he moved from Anaheim to the trailer park in September so he could live just three blocks from the sea.

However, Eitel said, he and his wife are already talking about trying to sell their $35,000 mobile home and moving.

“This is terrible,” he said. “Some people moved here because they liked the (sea) air. The air is supposed to be healthy. But we held a barbecue last Sunday, and we had to move inside.”