Sludge Creates Stink for Tract Residents

Residents of a neighborhood north of Ventura say sewage sludge used to fertilize a nearby field is making an unbearable stink--but their only alternative may smell even worse.

For four days, the Valle Vista tract south of Canada Larga Road has been bathed in the odor wafting from a field where the sludge has been spread by the Ojai Valley Sanitary District.

Officials with the sewage agency sympathize with residents and say the odor will go away--they just don’t know when.

The agency has stopped hauling sludge to the field, said general manager David Burkhart.

“For the time being it looks like we’ve done about as much as we can do in the field,” he said. “It’s just going to be a matter of time for the odors to dissipate.”

Sludge, Burkhart said, “is all the solid parts of the sewage. It’s everything that sinks to the bottom or floats to the top in our treatment process.”

For two years the sludge had been hauled to fallow fields in the Canada Larga Valley about two miles east of the Ojai Freeway.

But beginning last October, the district began treating sewage at a new plant west of the Ojai Freeway near Canada Larga Road, and hauling the sludge to a new field about half a mile east of the freeway.

Residents of the Valle Vista tract first complained of the odor Tuesday. “Since then we’ve been working on the problem just as fast and furiously as we can,” Burkhart said.

Options include masking the sludge smell with chemical agents that produce an odor of strawberries or citrus fruit.

“However, they are sickeningly sweet. The new odor can be worse than the original odor,” he said.

Consultants have been called to assess the situation. But Burkhart said he isn’t sure when the problem will be solved or how to contain the odor.

The plant can store up to two weeks of sludge, but Burkhart is hoping the problem will be solved long before then. He said he sympathizes with those who live downwind of the field.

“I’m sure there are a number of people living in the tract who wish I was living there at this precise moment,” Burkhart said.