Residents Complain About Sewage Smell : Camarillo: Sanitary plant odors drift to a mobile-home park.

A stench that has settled into a Camarillo mobile-home park for the past month is driving homeowners and golfers to distraction.

“I can’t even open my kitchen window. The smell comes in there, and it’s so bad,” said Shirley Barre, 63, a resident of the Camarillo Springs Country Club Village near the bottom of the Conejo Grade. “It upsets my stomach.”

The problem is Camarillo’s sewage treatment plant, less than a mile from the 261-unit mobile-home park, where four tons of treated waste are processed into compost each day.

The odor that emanates from the decomposing sludge has been described as worse than animal manure. On some days, strong westerly breezes carry the smell about two miles to the Ventura Freeway, mobile-home residents say.

City Community Services Director John Elwell said the odor problem is temporary.

When special bacteria that eat sewage died off a month ago, the end product--called sludge--came out with a much stronger smell than usual, he said. Workers are cultivating more of the sewage-eating bacteria, and they have tried to mask the odor by spraying chemical deodorants onto the smelly sludge every day.

“It shouldn’t get worse, it should be getting better,” Elwell said.

However, the smell will not blow over in time for the residents’ Fourth of July picnics.

The intensity of the odor varies according to the weather, but it probably won’t go away completely for at least another month, Ventura County Air Pollution Control District officials said.

“Within another week or two, it could turn around, but it could be another 30 days,” said Chris Cote, a pollution district inspector.

Residents of the mobile-home park, all of them senior citizens, say they don’t want to wait that long.

On Tuesday, Barre brought 12 written complaints to the pollution control district calling for immediate action.

“We have a Fourth of July outing planned. You just don’t go sit on your patio when you have an air problem,” Barre said.

City officials say the 34-year-old sewer plant has operated without problems until now. The 22-acre plant processes about 4 million gallons of sewage every day from households in the eastern part of Camarillo.

Because of mandatory cutbacks in water consumption that were ordered by the city, residents are using less water, so the sewage being processed at the plant is more concentrated than in past years.

Elwell said the city plans to expand the plant’s capacity by 50% so it can eventually handle 6 million gallons of sewage a day.

Some residents, such as Bill Torrence, 73, are skeptical that the plant can handle the amount of sewage it is treating now.

Torrence said he usually leaves Camarillo during the summer months to vacation. This year, he decided to stay and was sorry that he did.

“It was horrible,” he said. “You can smell it from the clubhouse.”

Even golfers at the Camarillo Springs Golf Course are holding their noses. A strong wind came up to blow most of the smell away as Dick LeBoy of Encino teed off at the fifth hole.

“It’s atrocious,” said LeBoy, who teaches golf at the Van Nuys Golf Course.

Ron Stevens, general manager of the golf course, said regular golfers are used to an occasional smelly blast, because five of the 18 holes sit within half a mile of the plant.

“It has been rather pungent,” he said. “This smells like something’s dead. It’s putrid.”

Golfers Bill and Ada DiPaola, who also live in the mobile-home park, said they have just about abandoned early-morning games since the odor intensified.

“It irritates my nose and my throat,” said Ada DiPaola, 64. “I’ve been at the complex eight years, but it’s been nothing like this year.”