Experts:Treatment plant doesn’t have to stink

Water churns Monday at the Waste Water Treatment plant in Gallup, as employees struggle to keep the equipment running to meet demand due to a shortage of staff and multiple equipment problems that they do not have the staff or funds to repair. Currently the plant has three job openings, but no onterested applicants willing to work for the wages being offered by the city. — © 2009 Gallup Independent / Staff Photo

Copyright © 2009
Gallup Independent
By Kathy Helms
Dine Bureau

An occasional series.

GALLUP — When the east wind blows through the west end of Gallup, and especially Mentmore Subdivision in summer, it doesn’t matter whether you’re outside grilling plump juicy steaks or a rack of hamburgers, residents say, quite frankly, it still smells like crap.

Dee Burke, a subdivision resident who lives about a mile from the plant, got so fed up with the odor, in fact, that a week ago she sat down to write a letter to the editor in hopes something would be done about the stench from Gallup Wastewater Treatment Plant. “You could smell it through the closed window,” she said.

She has tried to isolate whether the odor is worse early in the morning, late in the evening, or during particular types of weather. “I’ve tried to look at — oh, is it raining, is it this or that. That doesn’t seem to be a factor. I smell it a lot of times when I come home if I work an eight-hour day, like around 5 o’clock, but I also smell it sometimes early, early in the morning. If it’s an east wind, it really makes it bad.

“Truly, when I come back from work and get by the Ranch Kitchen and that smell hits you, there’s no disguising it, there’s no polite way to say it — it smells like shit out here. One minute you don’t smell anything and the next minute, boom, you hit this smell. It’s pretty nauseating, actually, and lately, it seems to me that it’s been worse.

“It’s gross to cook out, it’s gross on a nice summer’s evening when you want to have your windows open. You think about what if you wanted to sell your house and the people came to look at your house on one of the bad days — you’d never sell it,” Burke said.

John Goffe, a resident of the same subdivision, agrees. “When the weather comes from the east, it’s absolutely horrendous. If you get the winds out of the west, the opposite direction, then it’s not bad at all. You don’t get it in the house. But during the summer, it seems at night when it’s bedtime, that’s when it really is the worst. It smells like a toilet.”

Goffe said the odor also varies, ranging from “rotten eggs to just an open sewer.”

“With all the money they were supposed to have spent, I wish they would have fixed it. Tell the mayor to come out here and live for awhile. I’d be more than happy to put him up. I seriously wish that somebody who is in the government was able to be out here and spend some time, and catch it and smell it.”

George Galanis, former Gallup mayor for 10 years and owner of the Ranch Kitchen, said it’s not uncommon to get a whiff of the treatment plant, but added, “I’m kind of used to it.” He also receives complaints from some of his customers. “People think that there are natural gas leaks outside. I get a lot of people come in and say, ‘You have a gas leak.’

“It’s been an ongoing problem for years and years and years. I don’t know what they can do about it, to be quite honest. I think there is some kind of chemical that you can treat the smell with. There’s a chemical that will decrease the odor. I think it would serve the city well if someone would look into it.” Galanis doesn’t believe the odor has had a major impact on his business, but added, “It doesn’t do us any good.”

At Best Western Inns & Suites, the odor becomes noticeable around 4-5 p.m. “when most of our guests are checking in,” according to Latricia Joe, who works the front desk. “We get complaints. It’s really not good if you smell that when you’re coming into our restaurant, so we try to keep everything closed.”

Employees at Ortegas, Love’s and Navajo Travel plazas also said they can smell sewage from their locations on the west end of town. They also agreed that the odor is worse in summer or when the wind blows a certain direction. Sometimes they get a sewage odor coming up through the drain pipes in the kitchens and bathrooms, workers said.

Robert George, Domestic Waste Team Leader for New Mexico Environment Department’s Ground Water Quality Bureau said the Gallup facility is a conventional activated sludge treatment plant with a design flow of 5 million gallons per day. “Activated sludge is a term that refers to the use of a culture of microorganisms to capture and metabolize the waste in the waste water,” George said.

The Environment Department doesn’t regulate odors. “You can have a local ordinance passed that would be essentially a nuisance measure. It could be done on either a city basis or potentially a county basis, but it would be enforced by either the city or the county, not by the Environment Department,” he said.

“Odor is an element of wastewater treatment. Good operational practices can be put in place to try to minimize it, and those things should be in place to try to minimize it, but in the end, there’s always the potential there’s going to be odors associated with a treatment facility.

“I have not had the opportunity nor the need to identify specifically what the source of the odor is at the plant,” he said, but added that usually one of the biggest sources is a lack of dissolved oxygen. “If you have this mass of microorganisms that provide the treatment, they need oxygen to survive, just as humans do.”

Another potential source is the sanitary sewer system.

“Wastewater that has set in the collection lines for very long periods of time and finally arrives at the treatment plant can often contain hydrogen sulfide gas. It smells like rotten eggs and is a byproduct of the degradation of the organic material in wastewater,” George said.

Altering the aeration process to increase oxygen, increased maintenance, and preventive maintenance particularly of collection lines can help eliminate odors, he said. “I’ve dealt with virtually almost all of the large municipal treatment plants in the state of New Mexico, and I can’t point to exactly what it is at the Gallup plant that is so problematic with respect to odors, but I can tell you it’s been a long-standing issue.”

George said wastewater plants in Hobbs and Clovis are similar in size and employ different variations on the activated sludge theme.

Leo Wilson, superintendent of the Hobbs Wastewater Treatment Plant, said they are in the midst of an upgrade which will put them at just under 5 million gallons a day and also help control odors.

“Here in Hobbs we have long sewer lines out in the city.

When the sewage originates, some of it can take over 24 hours before it gets to the actual treatment plant. During that time it’s breaking down without oxygen. We introduce an iron salt at those locations, the far extremes of our collection system. What it does is it will precipitate, or make heavy the sulfides so they can’t convert over to hydrogen sulfide.

At the wastewater plant various areas that were normally open have been, or are in the process of being enclosed, he said. “Air underneath those covers, which would be the odorous air, it’s drawn off and run through a scrubber. It’s got special ductwork to draw it out to the biofilters, and those are stainless steel enclosures.” He placed the cost of odor control at roughly $1 million and their monthly cost for chemical treatment at between $15,000 and $20,000.

At the city of Clovis Wastewater Treatment Plant, a permitted 5 million-gallons-per-day plant, odor is not a problem, according to Durwood Billington, wastewater superintendent.

“Everything is air anerobic here. There’s absolutely no odor. We have air bubbling up through the water and it does what we call ‘freshening.’ The microorganisms that consume this waste, there is no odor to them. The microorganisms consume the waste very quickly, and as this flow enters those basins the microorganisms take over and there is no smell left at all.”

Billington said they use positive displacement blowers to blow air through an air line into the basin. “It’s got diffusers on the bottom of the basin that diffuse the air into real tiny bubbles, and as these bubbles rise, then part of the air is actually transferred as dissolved oxygen. That’s what the microorganisms breathe — dissolved air.”

The facility has from 400,000 to 700,000 pounds of actual live bacteria. “For every cubic inch of water there’s 9 trillion bacteria, and that bacteria is constantly eating human waste, and the byproduct from the microorganisms is water. Everything of ours goes into a 40 acre lagoon which kills off the pathogenic organisms, the disease-causing bacteria.”

The pathogens are killed by ultraviolet rays from the sun.

“Then it goes into a final 40 acre lagoon and the farmers take it and water their crops with it. All the sludge is composted to CFR 40-503 regulations and then that sludge, after compost, is given to the public. There is no smell whatsoever. It actually smells like dirt.

“The city of Clovis would be happy to invite some of their (GWTP’s) operators down for a little training. Maybe they can go through our process and learn how we do it and maybe that would help them,” Billington said.