Morning Edition's Lisa Peakes talks with Bill Smith, who's been going door to door in a neighborhood near the wastewater treatment plant to get peoples' impressions of the smells.
The City of Concord is holding a public meeting tonight to present a plan to reduce odors from the municipal sewage treatment plant.
Part of the meeting will focus on a program that recruits volunteers to identify the smells from the plant.
Bill Smith runs a communications company that’s helping the city find recruits. He’s been going door to door in the neighborhood next to the plant asking people whether they can help. He says professional engineers have already done what they can to understand what odors are coming from where. But local residents have to live with the problem every day:
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But the city isn’t leaving the task to untrained sniffers alone. Engineers will help the volunteers develop a vocabulary for recording what they smell and when they smell it, and other conditions:
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The River’s Edge Estates is right next door to the plant. Tracy Brooks has been there for 12 years. She’d heard about the volunteer program, so she wasn’t surprised when Bill knocked on her door:
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Other residents don’t mince any words about the smell:
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Bill Smith has spoken to about 30 people so far and would like to talk with another 20 or so before the training starts. Engineers expect to release the information from the volunteers in a report this fall. They’ll start working on a solution in 2006.
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