Residents stop creating a stink about sewage smells

Hereford residents are delighted with works carried out by Welsh Water which have seen an end to the unpleasant smells that used to come from the city’s waste water treatment works at Eign and Rotherwas, a meeting of RAWW (Residents and Welsh Water Liaison Group) heard.

Marc Willimont, Herefordshire Council’s acting regulatory services manager, told the meeting that there had been virtually no complaints about unacceptable odours coming from the waste water treatment works since the beginning of the year.

This compares with hundreds of complaints the council was receiving every year before Welsh Water invested around £17million in a series of improvement works at both sites.

Rob McLellan, vice-chairman of the residents group called “RAWW”, said: “This is a perfect example of what can be achieved by people working together and a good job has been done for the people of Herefordshire. We residents are now able to sit out in our gardens without the smell.

“I’m glad we are not going to go back to those bad old days and, as residents, if we have nothing to complain about then we will be happy. It is mission accomplished for us,” he added.

The RAWW group (Residents and Welsh Water) was formed in November 2004 to highlight odour complaints around the two waste water treatment works in Hereford and has been supported by environmental health officers from Herefordshire Council and the Environment Agency.

Andrew Bowen, Welsh Water regional investment manager, said: “We aim to have a positive impact on the environment and to be a good neighbour within the communities of which we are part, so we are very pleased to have resolved this issue.” 

Welsh Water has since spent approximately £1.6m on works to improve odour abatement at both the Rotherwas and Eign waste water treatment plants. Works included the enclosure of many odorous sludge handling processes, the building of two new tower filters complete with cowls and odour abatement measures and the installation of a cowl and a new odour control system on the Rotherwas High Rate Filter. All other improvement works have also been designed with odour abatement in mind.

Dr David O’Malley, the odour specialist for Imtech who are strategic partners with DCWW, said that regular monitoring of smells from the works is now carried out and if agreed levels are exceeded an alarm will go off to enable the smell to be filtered off. This has not happened to date.

Chris Barnes from the waste specialist company “Tradebe” who also operate an independent process on the Eign site, added that they carried out strict monitoring of all wastes tankered in before it was received onto site. They also now have an odour management plan in place.  

Councillor Ursula Attfield, chairperson of the RAWW group, said: “There has been a huge amount of work involved in getting rid of these unpleasant odours and this monitoring should ensure there are no more problems in the future.”

Although RAWW will remain as a group, it will only reconvene on an ad hoc basis as and when needed, as their objective has now been met.