Something smells rotten in ‘PooVille’
The smell from the cheese plant can be so bad it wakes sleepers in the dead of night, on the verge of gagging, reaching to shut windows.
A hospital nurse says patients wonder whether a sewer has backed up. A man on Queen Street circulated a petition that began: “Welcome to PooVille.” Parents wonder aloud what their kids are breathing. A dinner host joked at a public meeting about the difficulty of pairing wine with the odeur du jour.
The mayor, also a neighbour, had his own house wafted with stink and frustration.
And Marnie Fossitt, 63, a retired interior designer who has lived beside the Parmalat plant for 39 years, finally said: “Enough is enough.”
Fossitt and a group of neighbours, mostly on Gladstone Street, have banded together to demand action from the international dairy giant, which operates one of Canada’s largest cheese plants smack in the middle of the town of 2,500.
It has not been easy. This is battling the company in a company town. (Parmalat employs about 280 full time and contributes to 1,000 spinoff jobs.)
A victim-of-success story, the expanding plant, close to 100 years old, is now operating around the clock processing millions of litres of milk, brought by roughly 100 trucks a day. (Black Diamond and Balderson cheese, and Lactantia butter are three of its more famous brands.)
But its main truck entrance is on Gladstone, a dead-end residential street with modest houses and little front yards — certainly no route for a parade of 18-wheelers. The effluent lagoons, meanwhile, struggle to handle both the volume and environmental demands, and the dust, at times, has been an unrelenting grey snowfall.
“Itisnow1a.m.andthesituation here has reached a breaking point,” Fossitt wrote to this newspaper a few days ago.
So, at her dining room table one day this week, there was Fossitt, husband Jonas, neighbour Sean Whelan, 35, a father of two young girls, Dawn Erickson, 55, a nurse, Winchester native and mother of three, and Chuck Clavet, 66, a resident on Gladstone for 27 years.
Fossitt plopped down a clear plastic bag of grey power, fine dust collected from a daily sweep outside. “This is every day. It’s everywhere.”
No radicals, they don’t want Parmalat to move or close and they recognize they bought homes near an industrial plant. They just want the company to be a better neighbour and make reasonable efforts to solve historic problems that are affecting daily life.
“I have a passion for the town. I don’t want to see anyone lose their jobs. We’re a dairy area,” says Erickson.
“Wedon’tevenwantthem fined. We just want them to stop the smell.”
It looks like relief is on the way. At a public meeting last week attended by more than 200 residents — and jarring, blackgarbed security guards — Parmalat outlined a plan to deal with the smell, the truck traffic and the dust.
The smell emanates from biodegrading sludge that settles on the bottom of open-air lagoons. It is dredged seasonally and spread as fertilizer. More production, more sludge — residents say the smell has never been this bad.
But Parmalat pledged at the meeting that help is finally on the way this year. Company officials say they’re spending millions on odour and dust reduction, also promising to build a fourmetre-high noise barrier on the Gladstone side and planning for a less disruptive road for exiting trucks.
A spokesman for the company said a “dissolved air filtration” system is now being installed. It uses air bubbles to float suspended solids to the top, where they can be skimmed off. Also on thewayisasystemthatemploys large geo-textile bags that hold thesludge(andsmells)and gradually dries it until it emerges as compost or fertilizer.
“We know it will address the odour. It’s being installed as we speak,” said Parmalat spokesperson Anita Jarjour.
The company is also hoping to improve an internal gravel road (about 500 metres long) that leads north to Liscumb Road so that exiting trucks will no longer have to use Gladstone, a process that often blocks traffic and leads to reverse-gear beeping at all hours.
It is also paving part of its large yard and improving dust collection and dampening, said Jarjour.
Mayor Eric Duncan said last week’s meeting was an important step because it marked a public declaration by Parmalat to deal with long-standing grievances.
“One of my biggest frustrations is that Parmalat did great to get the expansion but did not build the infrastructure at the same time.”
He also quelled rumours that the multinational would just up and leave if Winchester residents put up too much of a fuss.
“As mayor, on council 11 years, at no time has Parmalat or its executive ever threatened our community.”
Fossitt and others are treating the promises — and the lack of hard deadlines — with some skepticism, but feel like the pressure is finally getting through.
“Sometimes I feel like we’re pushing rope but other times I think we’ve made people aware and they know we’re watching them.”
One of my biggest frustrations is that Parmalat did great to get the expansion but did not build the infrastructure at the same time.