October 4, 2007 - Think that sewage odor problem has been solved? Stink again

Work stinks lately.

And while you might think your job stinks year-round, the past couple weeks have been particularly odiferous for me and the colorful cast I work alongside at the Press & Sun-Bulletin.

That’s right: it’s sewage-scrubbing time at the Binghamton-JC Joint Sewage Treatment Facility! Apparently, this far-reaching stench is an annual ritual.

And while I found myself checking my desk, keyboard, and the deputy Community Conversation editor for the source of the mysterious odor, my relatively oblivious co-workers told me that the smell used to be — believe it or not — much, much worse.

(If you’re an online reader enjoying this from the convenience of a Febrezed living room, imagine: halftime, in the upper deck men’s room at Giants Stadium, on free-chili dogs-and-beer night. And it is not high-quality chili ...)

At times, they say, the smell was so bad, the Press used to print a “stink-o-meter” to “measure” just how overwhelming the day’s odor was. The accompanying graphic was a skunk with a clothespin on its nose.

A trip to the archives revealed hundreds of clips about the Old Vestal Road facility, some with clever headlines — “Composter ready to rot and roll” (Sept. 13, 1996) being my personal favorite.

But Jay Leno-isms aside, the smell is pretty bad. While I don’t smell anything from my downtown living quarters, I can see how the wafting odor can be more than a simple nuisance for families living around Vestal Road, Riverside Drive and the surrounding area.

And although I lived across the street from this very office, on campus, for several years, this particular aroma never seemed to strike the college. (I’ll credit the 5,000 coeds filling half the dorms, with their perfume and Glade plug-ins; if not for them, the resulting male stench might be 10 times worse than the present situation.)

Solutions — some very expensive — have been proposed in the past. A July 1989 article by Edie Lau quotes several “furious” Johnson City residents, including then-mayor Edward Boncek, voicing their disappointment that a $266,000 geodesic dome wouldn’t be in place until 1990.

The next Edie Lau article in the stack?

June 14, 1990: “Dome fails to seal in sewage plant odor.”

And then?

July 10, 1991: “JC attacks sewage smell: Plan includes chemical cover, ‘odor investigators.’” (‘Odor investigator’ meaning, the town was soliciting opinions from those living in the neighborhood.)

A 1992 clipping discusses a $1 million odor-control system, while a 1994 Sarah Peery clip is titled, “Sewer stench is under study again.”

And in 2002, residents again were told to wait “just three more years,” until 2005, for the completion of yet another expensive plan that doesn’t seem to have worked.

And so countless summers — and millions of dollars of research — later, the smell remains. And while it’s true that, as a famous book once declared, “Everyone Poops,” it’s a shame that after so many years, this town’s smell activists have yet to put together a definitive ... well, bowel movement.

Strub is a senior at Binghamton University and a part-time copy editor at the Press & Sun-Bulletin. His column appears Thursdays.

cstrub@pressconnects.com