A project to repair part of a wastewater treatment plant in Vallejo is causing a stench in the area and residents are not happy with the expected timeline.
When Christine Brown and her husband moved to Vallejo in 2018, they immediately fell in love.
“People are very nice. You know, when you say hello to people on the street and it doesn’t matter what their background is, where they are on a socio-economic scale, people say, ‘Hello, how are you.’ ‘You know, it’s just a very down-to-earth place,” Brown said.
They live in a beautiful historic Victorian home in the Heritage District with a large backyard where Brown says her husband grows fruit and lots of hot peppers.
“These are the white Thais, and what else is here, blood spirit, which is such a Halloween-y name, the Aji pineapple, and what else is here, oh solar flare. Those are his favorite ones,” Brown said.
Brown said everything went well for the first few years, but around 2020 it all changed.
“It’s really bad. Like it’s sickening, I mean you can’t even open the door without this smell hitting you in the face, and it smells like a broken sewer line,” Brown said.
She said the air outside her home has often smelled so bad over the past four years that she can’t even enjoy her backyard anymore.
She believes the cause is a nearby wastewater treatment plant.
“The problem is it comes out and affects us in Heritage, like I said, maybe 40 to 60 percent of the time,” Brown said.
The city’s wastewater district said it is repairing part of the plant and that this is the source of the odor.
They said the project should be completed by November. But during weeks of temperatures in the high 90s, like the Bay Area is currently seeing, Brown said the stench only gets worse.
“It’s a house from 1896. We’re concerned about climate change, so we don’t have air conditioning, we don’t use air conditioning. We don’t want to generate that in the world, so today I work at home. I work in my office. We have everything shut down because you can’t have the windows open because it’s so bad,” Brown said.
She said she and the people she has spoken to in Vallejo find the city’s timeline unacceptable. She wants the problem resolved now, but unfortunately says she isn’t very confident it will even be resolved by the fall.
“The stench is bad enough, but that combined with the feeling that the community is not being respected, not being listened to, not being cared for, I think that’s the big problem,” Brown said.
KPIX has contacted the Vallejo Flood and Wastewater District for comment. They haven’t responded yet.
As for Brown, she said she doesn’t know how much longer she and her husband can take it. They may eventually have to move, an option she knows not everyone in town has.
“What’s important is what happens to the people who live here, who have always lived here, whose families, parents, grandparents, aunts and uncles live here. It should be good for everyone, whether we choose to stay or not.” Brown said.
