Environment and Features and Home and instagram and Kentucky and local and News and producers-picks and science and Weather and Weird 3:13 pm
“It was the first one I had ever seen! It was exciting to witness," Shari Klosterman said of the video she captured in Gulf Shores.
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Environment and government 5:40 am
Lily Burris
James Krebs, a utility worker with MSD, cleans a catch basin on 42nd Street.
Every time Teri Carr has company at her home in Park DuValle, she worries about the potential smells from the street.
The odors are offensive and embarrassing — like sewage or feces, a chemical smell or rotten eggs. Sometimes they’re so strong they wake her up in the middle of the night.
Each time, she dutifully registers a complaint with the city, hoping something will change.
“I have to deal with my quality of life,” Carr said. “It’s a shame I may have to move from this neighborhood – not necessarily for crime, but for quality of air.”
Lily Burris
Teri Carr
The Louisville and Jefferson County Metropolitan Sewer District concedes the sewers in Park DuValle and many neighborhoods in the West End of Louisville have odor issues. Six years of data show MSD has received the most odor complaints — more than 400 — from the 40211 zip code, which includes the Park DuValle and Chickasaw neighborhoods, and a portion of Russell.
Nearly all of the rest of the high-complaint zip codes are in the West End, which is predominantly Black, historically underserved by city services and closest to the state’s oldest and biggest wastewater treatment plant.
Congressman John Yarmuth recently announced preliminary approval from Congress for a federal appropriation package of more than $5 million for Louisville projects, $480,000 of which are designated to address odors in the sewers of the Park DuValle neighborhood.
But the money isn’t guaranteed, and the demand isn’t new. The MSD has until the end of next year to comply with an order from the Louisville Metro Air Pollution Control District to mitigate the problems with West End sewers.
MSD officials said they’ll find a way to complete the work eventually, even without federal money. They say the sewer odor, while inconvenient, isn’t hazardous. That’s little comfort to Carr.
“Even if it is just offensive, I don’t want it in my backyard,” Carr said.
Sewers in the Park DuValle area range from 100 years old to 20, but regardless of when they were built, they feed into the combined sewer system that once dumped into the Ohio River.
The combined sewer system is mostly within I-264 toward the Ohio River. This includes all of the West End and other neighborhoods like Cherokee Triangle, the Highlands and Clifton. Now, this system takes wastewater and stormwater in the same pipe to the water treatment plant.
About two-thirds of the county’s waste is gravity-fed into the Morris Forman Water Quality Treatment Center on the Algonquin Parkway — two miles east of Carr’s house in Park DuValle.
“[The waste] gets larger and slower as you get closer to the plant,” said Rachael Hamilton, interim director of the Metro Air Pollution Control District, which monitors air quality standards and residents’ complaints.
Hamilton called the odors in the West End an environmental justice issue.
“That’s really a vestige of redlining in this community,” Hamilton said.
When stagnant waste combines with dry weather, Hamilton said, the odor can be really strong. An event like that in 2019 prompted the board to issue a legally binding, agreed order with MSD to correct the problem.
When MSD investigated the issue in Park DuValle, they inspected 198 catch basins. More than half were missing necessary equipment to seal off odor.
Brian Bingham, MSD’s chief operations officer, said the work in Park DuValle to repair these catch basins is their first major initiative to complete the terms of the order.
The cost for repairing a catch basin can vary from $1,500 to $20,000 depending on what needs to be done, Bingham said. While this current project is focused on the West End, he said it’s not the only place with these issues according to MSD.
“Not all this problem is in West Louisville,” Bingham said. “This problem exists to some level throughout the entire combined sewer system as it does with every combined sewer system and every combined sewer city in the country.”
Of nearly 3,000 odor complaints from 2015 through 2020, more than a third came from zip codes in the West End.
Catch basin traps are similar to the j-shaped pipes seen under sinks in homes, which holds water to reduce smells. It’s this equipment that’s faulty across much of Park DuValle. “On days when we have lots of heat, no rain, the water gets stagnant,” said James Krebs, a utility worker with MSD who cleans catch basins. “All the organic materials and people cutting their grass, leaves start breaking down in there and it creates a smell. We get a lot of odor complaints with that.”
Last month, Krebs operated a small crane arm on 42nd Street to clean a catch basin with an odor complaint. Workers access the sewer system via brown, rusted metal sewer drains. Underneath those drains are catch basins — along with waste and trash. Trash gets shoved down into sewer drains and piled up on top of the grates. The under-the-street sludge can make whole neighborhoods smell.
Lily Burris
Trash accumulating in a sewer on 42nd Street
Krebs’ crane arm reaches down into the catch basin and, scoop by scoop, pulls out the organic matter and trash and drops it into a small dump truck.
And Krebs sprinkles deodorizing pellets into the drain.
The whole endeavor took Krebs about 15 minutes.
The dump truck takes the goop, for lack of a better word, to one of MSD’s facilities where a bigger truck takes it to the garbage dump.
This process will repeat itself thousands of times as MSD’s $6 million project to address sewer odor issues in the West End gets underway. MSD identified five priority neighborhoods: Park DuValle, Shawnee, California, Chickasaw and Taylor Berry.
Bingham, the MSD chief operations officer, said their plans for Park DuValle are on a bigger scale than previous projects. Odor mitigation is already embedded in a lot of other projects they do, Bingham said, so it’s hard to calculate the investment comparatively, but he estimates they already spend about $2 million across the county on odor mitigation each year.
MSD estimates the Park DuValle work alone will cost nearly $1 million, including master planning and communication efforts.
Residents say there’s a lot of catching up to do. Jimmy Henderson, Sr. grew up in Park DuValle.
“As far as I can remember, you know, I can remember my parents talking about it,” he said of the smell.
It’s not just the sewers — he said there are sewage smells as well as chemical smells from the Rubbertown factories just southwest. Overall, he said there’s a lack of respect for this part of town — so he appreciates that MSD is prioritizing the West End.
“I know, for a fact, they have spent money, a lot of money, trying to rectify some of those problems,” Henderson said.
Carr said she and her neighbors in Park DuValle hope that whatever work they do results in improved air quality. She’s bought air filters, essential oils and anything she thinks will help.
“I don’t want them to get this money and then they do all of these things and we still smell what we smell, and don’t understand how what they did benefited us,” she said.
Lily Burris was a summer fellow at WFPL and KyCIR. She’s a senior at Western Kentucky University.
The post In West End, Sewer Odors Are A Long-Standing Problem appeared first on Kentucky Center for Investigative Reporting.
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Environment and Health and Home and local and News 6:39 pm
The program will study the summer heat’s effects on residents and develop local strategies to mitigate public health impacts.
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Environment and lpm 12:27 pm
History is right underneath your feet while driving down Broadway between south Second and Campbell streets in downtown Louisville, but unfortunately this bit of history is falling apart — brick by brick.
Contractors with Louisville’s Metropolitan Sewer District have discovered a pair of holes in the large brick sewer pipe beneath Broadway; a pipe completed in the year after the Civil War ended, 1866.
Workers are planning how best to repair the pipe, but considering how long past repairs have taken, it could take two months or longer fix, said Sheryl Lauder, MSD spokesperson.
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air pollution and Air Pollution Control District and Environment and lpm 11:17 am
Sandy Griffith long ago gave up on growing vegetables at her home in Butchertown. When the wind kicks up, concrete dust from her neighbor blows into her backyard, settling on her patio furniture and plants.
Her neighbor’s dust caused Griffith health problems, and as a result she’s basically ceded her backyard to the dust, Griffith said. She’s complained about it for decades.
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Environment and indiana and lpm and streams 12:43 pm
Southern Indiana’s Silver Creek is one step closer to recreational activity now that funding has been secured to remove a low-head dam from the waterway.
Silver Creek forms the border between Clark and Floyd counties. Residents of the area have historically had limited access to the Ohio River tributary. But that is set to change with the development of Origin Park, a 600-acre project stretching from New Albany to the Falls of the Ohio in Clarksville.
River Heritage Conservancy (RHC), the non-profit group behind the park, revealed its design in August, including plans to make the park “flood-resilient.” At its core, executive director Scott Martin said Origin Park will be “amphibious,” allowing visitors to kayak on the creek and flooded plains around it when water levels are high.
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Community and Environment and lpm and pandemic and utilities 5:50 am
As the autumns chill descends on Kentucky, utility customers who’ve fallen behind on payments because of the global pandemic and economic recession could have their power, gas and water service disconnected beginning Oct. 20.
The Public Service Commission requires all utilities to create payment plans for residential customers who’ve fallen behind on their bills between March 16 and October 1, 2020.
The terms of the payment plans require utilities give at least six months to pay the past due balances, but if customers fall behind on those payments, utilities can disconnect services, according to the order.
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Environment and science and tech 3:41 pm
Hundreds of trees have taken root in south Louisville. The group plans to have more plantings on the way in early 2021.
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black lung disease and Bob Murray and Coal and Environment and Health and lpm 8:20 pm
Robert E. Murray, the former CEO and president of the now-bankrupt Murray Energy, has filed an application with the U.S. Department of Labor for black lung benefits. For years, Murray and his company fought against federal mine safety regulations aimed at reducing the debilitating disease.
“I founded the company and created 8,000 jobs there until the move to end coal use. I am still chairman of the board,” he wrote on a Labor Department form that initiated his claim obtained by the Ohio Valley ReSource. “We’re in bankruptcy, and due to my health could not handle the president and CEO job any longer.”
According to sources, Murray’s claim is still in the initial stages and is being evaluated to determine the party potentially responsible for paying out the associated benefits. The Labor Department is required to determine a liable party before an initial ruling can be made on entitlement to benefits. If Murray’s claim were to go before an administrative law judge, some aspects of the claim would become a matter of public record.
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2020 election and climate change and election 2020 and Environment and evangelical christians and lpm 2:00 pm
Emily Robertson is a senior at Covenant College on Lookout Mountain near Chattanooga, Tennessee. Shes also an evangelical Christian, which makes her part of a key voting bloc for President Donald Trump.
But Trump wont get a vote from Robertson, who describes faith as the most important thing in her life, and who is a fellow with the growing Young Evangelicals for Climate Action. She does not like the presidents climate change agenda, or rather, the lack of one.
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