'Death mixed with a septic tank': What happens when a bad odour lingers

Friday, 27 May 2022

Bromley resident Vickie Walker tells city councillors that smells coming from the city's wastewater treatment plant have made her miserable. (First published April 6, 2022)

Aotearoa is actually a really smelly place - from wastewater stinks to offal odours, sulphuric secretions and rotten milk muck ups. So what happens to communities when a putrid pong doesn't disappear? Chris Hyde reports.

It's the lack of sleep that hits the hardest. In daylight the smell of the fire-damaged wastewater plant isn't necessarily bearable, but it is escapable.

But at night it seeps under the bedcovers. The resilient Christchurch suburb of Bromley, shaken by earthquakes, is tossing and turning again for a new reason.

The smell isn't just in their nostrils, it's in their minds, a subconscious voice that's begging them to stop lying down. Get up. Get away. Fly you fool.

* Bromley residents live with the double-stink bomb of Christchurch's waste

* $10m contract to remove rotting material from wastewater treatment plant

Drone footage of the fire damage at Christchurch's Bromley wastewater treatment plant. Two trickling filters were damaged by the fire.

* Environment Canterbury refuses to issue consent breach over wastewater stink

University of Auckland professor of psychology Paul Corballis describes smell as a 'gatekeeper sense'. It serves one main purpose - to keep us away from noxious and poisonous things.

'A bad smell is a signal to the nervous system to stay clear,' Corballis says.

Damian Elley says living under the stench of the Bromley wastewater plant is like having something rather unpleasant on toast in the morning, in your sandwiches at lunch and a similarly disgusting concoction at dinner.

'If you've got a smell that's constantly negative, forever activating that kind of avoidance reaction, it is almost certainly a stressor and will kick in a stress response.'

It's what Bromley resident Vickie Walker has had to face night after night, a months-long barrage on her senses.

“It's why I've been so exhausted … a lot of the time. Before this I had a lot of energy - my husband and I we're business owners, so we have to.

“But now I just, my brain is just foggy, and I can't concentrate. When we had regular earthquakes we'd all wake with that sort of frightened flight feeling and that's exactly what happens when I'm woken up in the middle of the night with the stench.'

Bromley isn't the first place to experience a long-standing stench, but it could be a test case for how New Zealand reacts to similar pongs in future.

Last week, Christchurch City Council voted to give 3300 residents in the vicinity $200 for their troubles.

Reaction to that was mixed, with some including Walker feeling it doesn’t go far enough. She would have preferred the council bought everyone an air purifier – hers cost her $295.

But it’s almost unheard of for affected residents to be compensated for a smell.

Generally, the deterrent of a fine against a company, or in some cases a council, has been viewed as the way forward in the past.

06042022 Photo. Stacy Squires.CHRISTCHURCH. Vickie Walker, an east-side resident who is fed up with the smell from the wastewater treatment plant.

And even the prosecutions that result in those fines can be challenging because smell is such a subjective thing.

The smell detectives

To make their assessments more likely to be accurate, councils send compliance officers and other staff to get their noses “calibrated” at Watercare Laboratory Services in Auckland.

Compliance manager for Hawke’s Bay Regional Council, Rob Hogan, said his teams used the nose calibrations, which are done by sampling various odours, to help determine how sensitive each of their noses were.

When an odour complaint is then called in, the council tries to send two staff members with calibrated noses, ideally with known different sensitivities, to assess the smell.

Hogan says a 10-minute odour test is repeated in different areas around the smell to ensure they’re certain of the location it’s coming from. It can be particularly tricky if it’s windy.

“We go to the informant’s address first and speak to them and if the team can pick up an odour, they'll start doing an odour measurement. Every 10 seconds, they'll have a sniff and just write down the intensity.”

Our biggest stinkers

As the Ministry for the Environment’s good practice guide notes, sometimes the biggest stink is over the response from those who caused it.

If a factory’s been good for a town and communicates well with it, then the town is sometimes prepared to look, or smell, the other way, the Ministry notes.

Based purely on how big the fines have been, you could mount an argument that Waharoa's protein plant pong ($460,000 in reparations over 11 years) has been the country's worst example of a persistent smell.

Then there's Tuakau - another Waikato protein plant town - which described its several months long smell in 2020 in the most creatively disgusting way: 'like death mixed with a septic tank”.

The company eventually earnt a $180,000 fine.

The milk products we so rely on can be offensive too - remember Eltham in 2013?

South Taranaki District Council gave the green light to Fonterra dumping 3 million litres of the by-product buttermilk, and also milk contaminated with oil waste, at the Eltham wastewater plant in 2013.

As it rotted, the smell plagued the township and the council was eventually fined $115,000 for its part in it.

It's important to remember that some of our most notorious smells are also completely natural.

Type 'Rotorua smell' into Google, and you'll get thousands of travel blogs from overseas visitors that are all linguistic variations on the same idea – that Rotorua stinks, but it's still cool.

The great thing about the sulphuric perfume of inland Bay of Plenty is that not only is it natural, but studies have found it's also harmless.

It's not often you'll see it mentioned in local media either because, well, no-one really cares about it after a day or two.

Can you just get used to bad smells?

Christchurch was built on wetlands and there was a smell - even before settlers arrived.

Corballis says that, just like Rotorua, Bromley residents will get somewhat used to their surrounding smell, though never completely.

“Sensory systems are really more about detecting change in the environment than about protecting the environment. So in the case of smell, if there's a constant chemical in the air, you will adapt to it.

'Intuitively, you sort of know this is happening, but if someone's cooking in the kitchen and somebody else comes into the house, they'll often say 'oh, that's smells amazing in here' and the cook doesn't necessarily notice it.'

But as Corballis says there's no adaptation to smell that can prevent you from smelling a familiar bad smell once you've breathed fresh air and then returned to it.

Residents of Bromley have complained that even when the smell disappears, it lingers in their furniture and their clothes.

Corballis says some of this will be chemical but much of it will be psychological – even after bad odours disappear, they can linger in the memory, in the same way that you remember what your grandmother's cookies smelt like as they baked.

“One of the things we know about all sensory things is the environment around you is your construction of it based on interacting with a bunch of stimuli.

Much of our wetland landscapes have been filled in for farmland or houses.

“And sometimes you see or hear or smell things that aren't there.”

Clean air nirvana – or smelly swamp?

One of Aotearoa’s big attractions in advertisements to colonial settlers in the 1800s was as a nirvana for clean air, the antithesis of industrial England.

But the reality was different, because our natural world has always been a smelly place.

The estuaries of Waikato and Christchurch were treated with contempt by settlers for various reasons, but one of them was because their odour was so pungent.

In a paper titled 'Historical smellscapes in Aotearoa New Zealand: Intersections between colonial knowledges of smell, race, and wetlands', Dr Meg Parsons and Dr Karen Fisher, of the University of Auckland, note the terror that smell and water vapour rising from estuaries invoked in miasma-fearing European settlers.

In 1875, Napier (population 3000) experienced an outbreak of a 'fever' (incorrectly labelled malaria) which was blamed by officials on the 'noisome emanations from the swamp' beside the town.

The 'tepid swamps', it was reported, poisoned the 'otherwise pure air' and brought 'hundreds to an early grave'.

The deaths of 140 people in Napier were linked to the 1875 fever epidemic and later that year, the Parliament introduced the first legislation that specifically authorised wetland drainage.

The Napier Swamp Nuisance Act enabled local government officials to fill in any parcel of land deemed to be a muddy watery odorous 'nuisance' without the consent of the landowners, the paper says, noting the act helped shape the destruction of wetlands throughout the country.

Bromley, and indeed much of Christchurch, was built on one of these subsequently destroyed swamps.

Walker agrees that it is ironic that instead of removing the smell, nearly 200 years of developments, and a bit of bad luck, has simply concentrated it into her bedroom.

“I thought this would be where I retire. I've got a beautiful community of people around me here. But then this wastewater fire happens, and now I don't even know what to think any more.

“I was given a good sense of smell for a reason, but it wasn't this.”