Smell solution?
Odor control officer has ideas
Gallup Wastewater Treatment Plant superintendant Robert Sekiya holds up a sample of treated water at the Wastewater Treatment Plant Sept. 12, 2008.— © 2009 Gallup Independent / Cable Hoover

Copyright © 2009
Gallup Independent
By Bill Donovan
Staff writer

GALLUP — There’s hope that one day residents in the western portion of Gallup will no longer have to call their hometown “stinky city.”

Or so says Robert Sekiya, who is Gallup’s first odor control officer at the wastewater treatment plant.

Sekiya comes here after spending 13 years at the Albuquerque wastewater treatment plant, where he also held the title of odor control officer.

When he came back to Gallup last summer, he said he realized there was an odor problem but he also realized that it did not take a rocket scientist to solve it. Over the next few weeks he plans to do some diagnostic tests to try and get to the root of the smell that has been driving residents of the western portion of town crazy for the past two decades.

On Thursday, he sat down in the plant’s snack area to talk about the smell problem. On the walls of the snack area was the recent Independent article entitled “Treatment plant doesn’t have to stink.” Outside, the air was clear and fresh, with no odor whatsoever. It was a rare good-smell day.

The key to getting rid of the smell, he said, is not to let the “sludge” get stagnant. This is caused, he added, when the process at the plant is running inefficiently and the solids just remain in the plant’s 117,875-gallon tank. One thing he plans to do in the next few weeks is take the plant’s thickener off-line temporarily to determine what needs to be done so that it operates at its maximum efficiency.

But he admits that this may not be the problem.

Instead, the way to solve the problem may be to put a cover the thickening tank and add activated carbon vessels to treat the fumes before exiting the thickener. He said he recently consulted with an engineer to determine how much the cover would cost, and while he is still waiting for a quote, he estimated that it could come to about $100,000.

“There are a few options,” he said, adding some are more expensive than others. “And in the coming weeks, I’ll be looking into just what we can do to get rid of these odors.”

While he doesn’t know right now what’s causing the odors, he said he does know that the problem can be corrected or at least reduced to the point where residents near the plant won’t notice it. All it’s going to take is patience and maybe some money. “We’ll have to look at our budget to see what we can afford.”

There are two problems with this, say westside residents.

The first, said Dee Burke, is that she and others who have been complaining about the smell have been told before that city officials were working on the problem and were told to be patient.

In fact, shortly after Eric Honeyfield became city manager in 2002, one of the first things he said was that he was going to get rid of that smell before he left office. Honeyfield is no longer around but the smell is still here.

“When I moved to this area (Blue Hill Avenue) two years ago, I was also told that the city was working on getting rid of the smell,” she said, adding that she has seen no evidence that anyone has been doing anything.

Officials at the water treatment plant said that the number of complaints has been going down since June but Burke said that may be because the residents getting tired of complaining and having their complaints ignored. “It doesn’t seem to be getting any better,” she said.

But what if Sekiya is right and the problem can be solved by putting a cover over the tank? After all, that seems to make some sense — if you have a smell and put a lid on it, the smell would likely be contained in the tank.

The problem with that approach is the cost and the question of whether city officials feel eliminating the smell is high enough of a priority to come up with the money to fix it.

“That would have to be a decision made by the City Council,” City Manager Gerald Herrera said, who pointed out that the City Council also had other needs that have to be addressed, such as a new roof at Red Rock Park and at the Northside Senior Citizen Center. And with state funds getting harder and harder to acquire because of the current economic downturn and the gross receipts tax revenue declining, the council will be finding itself making some hard decisions in the next year on what it can afford to do.

Jay Azua, who represents the west side on the City Council, said he plans to fight hard for funds to meet the needs of his district but points out that he expects the other council delegates to do the same for their districts.

But Burke said she didn’t think it would be a problem getting the money if Mayor Harry Mendoza or some of the other powerful political figures in town had to wake up each morning to the smell of an outhouse outside their doors.

“That wouldn’t make any difference,” Herrera said when told of her comment.

He added that before the city spends a lot of money for a cover or something else, he would like to see some studies done to determine if the smell is coming from the plant or somewhere along the collection line.

If it’s a plant problem, there may be some justification to having everyone in the city chip in — through increases in the utility bills, for example — to help pay for the cost of correcting it. But if its a problem in the collection system and it’s concentrated solely in that part of the system on the westside, he questioned whether it would be fair to have people in other parts of the city have to help pay to correct it.

While people near the plant hate the smell, there’s something else that has made that just as angry in recent days and that was the statement made by Mendoza in the Independent a few days ago when he said that he didn’t think the smell was as bad “as people make it sound.”

“That was just disrespectful to the people in this area,” Burke said.

Another resident of that area, John Goffe agreed.

“I would like to invite Mendoza to come and live in my house for a month and see if he still feels that way, but I know he wouldn’t come,” Goffe said.

Some cities like Albuquerque have a special hotline for residents to call if they notice a smell in their area. Gallup doesn’t have one, but city officials said people who notice the smell can call the city’s main utility number at 863-1200 and report it at any time.