Resident cries foul over smell
An Eltham resident fears a foul smell emanating from the town’s sewage treatment ponds may affect his health.
John Moore, who lives near the ponds, said he and his wife first noticed the stench on Sunday evening when the wind was blowing over the water towards them.
Moore said he required oxygen 20 hours a day and was worried the smell could make his medical condition worse.
‘‘I’m worried if I get more poison with this it will be the end of me and I’m not ready to die yet,’’ he said.
The smell had lessened by yesterday morning with a change in wind direction, he said.
The bad smell was caused after oxygen levels dropped in the ponds, which killed the bacteria that process the waste, Fiona Greenhill, group manager of community and infrastructure services with South Taranaki District Council, said.
Why the oxygen levels had dropped was unknown. ‘‘There are several possibilities which could have caused this to happen, but we don’t want to speculate until we’ve had a chance to investigate fully,’’ she said.
‘‘At this stage we have been focused on fixing the problem before we look into what happened.’’
The council passed a trade waste bylaw in 2017 that gives it the option of imposing penalties and recovering costs from any organisation that put problem waste into the sewer network.
However, it was possible for an event to occur spontaneously.
‘‘With this time of year as the weather gets cooler, it’s not unusual for waste water ponds to have these kinds of issues and we have heard of several other plants around the country that have had similar issues."
Council staff installed extra aerators to the ponds yesterday and added biological enhancements to help raise the oxygen levels.
‘‘We apologise to residents for any inconvenience caused by the odour and can assure you we are working to have this fixed as soon as possible,’’ Greenhill said.
The last time a serious odour problem affected the ponds was in mid-December 2015, when waste from an unknown source was blamed for lowering oxygen levels and killing the bacteria.
In 2013, a $33,000 deal between Fonterra and the STDC saw Fonterra dump about three million litres of buttermilk, along with another 150,000 litres of milk tainted with drilling wastes, at the Eltham wastewater treatment plant in an effort to deal with that spring’s record milk production.
The stench of the rotting milk caused months of distress and health issues for residents and cost the council hundreds of hours of staff time attempting to alleviate the problem.