Moores Creek Advanced Water Resource Recovery Facility

Stink stopper: Woolen Mills odor reduction project cuts the crap

The stench of sewage wafting through the Woolen Mills neighborhood has sickened residents since the early 1900s. But after the completion of a 10-year and $10 million odor reduction project at the local wastewater treatment facility, project pioneers and neighbors came together to celebrate the fact that they can finally breathe easy again.

“I haven’t noticed the smell for a while now,” says longtime Woolen Mills resident and former city planning commissioner Bill Emory. “It’s a big deal.”

Emory got a shout-out from City Councilor Kathy Galvin, who doubles as a member of the Rivanna Water & Sewer Authority board, at the May 23 celebratory picnic in the city’s Riverside Park. They were just steps away from the wastewater treatment facility when she gave the longtime resident kudos for “sound[ing] the alarm” on the stench in 2008, and refusing to back down.

In a July 2016 interview with C-VILLE, however, Emory said that when residents called the RWSA to complain about the sewage stink in the mid-1970s, “They would tell us smell was subjective.”

Even RWSA’s director of engineering and maintenance, Jennifer Whitaker, admitted that the organization’s initial response to residents 30 and 40 years ago was that living near pollution was a fact of life. She alluded to a former unnamed utility employee who—a “long, long time ago”—famously made light of the stink by saying, “We’re not baking cookies here.”

That wasn’t the only stomach-turning illusion of food during remarks made at the picnic.

Galvin also commented on RWSA board chairman Mike Gaffney’s mention of the treatment facility’s “gravity thickeners” that condense the biosolids into a concentrated solids product.

“Mike, I can’t get the phrase ‘gravity thickeners’ out of my head,” she said. “It sounds like [they’re used to make] a powder milkshake, but then I think that through and I get really sick.”

The Moores Creek Advanced Water Resource Recovery Facility treats nearly 10 million gallons of wastewater each day, and while there are lots of technical terms to describe what went down during the project to stop the stink, Emory doesn’t mince words: They did it by “covering the cat box.”

Aside from installing those primary clarifier covers that put an end to open-air waste composting, the utility also installed air scrubber and grit removal facilities.

“It really is pretty amazing,” Emory said, while he and his dog waited near the Mouth Wide Open food truck that RWSA provided for their picnic celebration. He commended Gaffney’s leadership of the board during the “long, tortured” process of crushing the odors.

About 40 people ambled over to the truck to claim their buffalo chicken bites and pimento cheeseburgers as Whitaker hung back to exchange words with attendees who continued to approach her.

Surprisingly, her crew hasn’t received too much other feedback on the project, she said.

“It used to be something we spent lots of time responding to,” Whitaker said, and added that she feels as though the community has already accepted this stink-free reality as the new norm.

Laughing, she was sure to put a positive spin on the lack of public reaction: “We’re not hearing from people about how it’s not working.”

Stopping the stink: Last phase of RWSA odor control project kicks off

The smell of sewage has wafted through the east side of Charlottesville for decades, driving out some residents, nauseating the ones who have stayed and even leaching into the surgical suites at Sentara Martha Jefferson Hospital, according to complaints by the hospital’s director at a Rivanna Water and Sewer Authority board meeting in 2014. But there’s good news: On July 15 the RWSA kicked off the final phase of a $9.33 million odor control project, which should finally stop the stink.

The odor comes from the RWSA’s wastewater treatment facility, Moores Creek Advanced Water Resource Recovery Facility, located near the Belmont-Carlton and Woolen Mills neighborhoods.

Though the first half of the treatment plant wasn’t built until the 1950s, signs of the smell can be traced back to the early 1900s. In the summer of 1916, the city’s main sewer pipe—then a straight pipe running from town into the Rivanna River—broke.

“Foul odors wafted across the mill village from the leak,” wrote Andrew Myers in The Charlottesville Woolen Mills: Working Life, Wartime and the Walkout of 1918. “The stench ended only with the arrival of the coldest winter in twenty years.”

The sewage smell has intermittently passed through town ever since.

In 2008, water engineering firm Hazen and Sawyer evaluated the issue and recommended a five-phase odor control project that would set the RWSA back almost $34 million. The authority stuck with a two-phase, long-term master plan it created in 2007, and the first phase of that was completed by mid-2012. In January 2014, RWSA was allotted $2 million from a capital improvement plan, and $9 million from the organization will initiate the final phase when construction begins next month.

“This project, as well as previous efforts starting in 2006, definitely had engineering, scientific, financial and community challenges to solve,” said Lonnie Wood, RWSA’s interim executive director, in a press release. “The [Albemarle County Service Authority,] city and county have worked well together to bring solutions to these odor problems for our neighbors through the RWSA.”

“I’m cautiously optimistic,” says Bill Emory, a former planning commissioner who purchased his Woolen Mills house in 1987 and who has lived in town since 1971. He adds that though the smell has always persisted, the RWSA has only worked diligently to eliminate the foul odors for the past decade or so. When residents would call on a regular basis in the mid-1970s, Emory says, “They would tell us smell was subjective.”

But the stench is real, and comes from the 10 million gallons of wastewater that RWSA treats each day at its facility. Last December, then-RWSA executive director Tom Frederick said it best: “We receive and have to treat what gets flushed from the toilets of 120,000 homes.”

The final phase of the project is on track to be completed by the end of 2017. Improvements include the installation of covers over key wastewater treatment systems and construction of a biological scrubber, which will vacuum the air above the systems to remove odor compounds. A sewage containment pipe and grit removal facilities will be installed, making it possible to eliminate the daily use of outdoor basins, such as post-digestion solids settling basins and the outdoor biosolids storage and handling area. RWSA will also purchase custom-covered trailers for transporting the biosolids.

Emory says it “feels good” that the project Frederick eventually got his board to approve is near completion, though the RWSA board, he says, has always been sensitive to the wants of ratepayers—most of whom do not want to pay increased rates to fund a project that doesn’t affect them.

“When you’re in Crozet and you flush the toilet, you don’t think about the smell it makes on the east side of Charlottesville,” Emory says.

But in light of the celebration, and quoting The Disagreeable Man at the July 15 kickoff, Albemarle County Supervisor Rick Randolph said, “The good are better made by ill, as odors crushed are sweeter still.”