What's that smell? Homeowners say odor affecting quality of life
- The Baker Commodities plant in Penfield is a meat-rendering facility that turns animal flesh and restaurant grease into usable products
- Off and on for at least 50 years%2C neighbors have complained about rank odors from the plant
- New York state officials say their hands are often tied regarding unwelcome smells
- Local officials are reluctant to use the most potent weapon they have -- citing the source of the odor as a public nuisance
Steve Healey and his family have a back yard that can only be called idyllic.
Treehouses in giant oaks, a swimming pool and slide, art and artifacts scattered about. And at the rear, cantilevered over a steep bluff, a deck overlooks emerald-green wetlands. Another wooded bluff rises on the far side.
"It's like being in the Adirondacks right next to Rochester. It's just a beautiful place to live," Healey said of his Penfield homestead. "The only downside to this little haven is the Baker Commodities plant."
That plant, hidden in trees on the far side of the wetlands less than a half-mile from Healey's deck, is a meat-rendering facility that turns animal flesh and restaurant grease into usable products.
Off and on for at least 50 years and probably more, neighbors have complained about rank odors from the plant off Browncroft Boulevard.
"People ask me what it's like and I say, Well, imagine driving by a dead raccoon on the side of the road, really ripe," Healey said. "You get that whiff and you can't get rid of it — it's in your nostrils, it's in your hair. And you come home to that."
Onslaughts of foul odors — sometimes just annoying, sometimes far worse than that — are an occasional byproduct of modern life. They can waft in from a landfill, a sewage treatment plant, a farm field or a factory with broken air pollution equipment.
But when something noxious arrives on the breeze, citizens' options are limited.
Persuasive phone calls and nasty letters might work.
Government officials might join in the persuasion, but that only goes so far. New York state officials say their hands are often tied, and local officials are reluctant to use the most potent weapon they have — citing the source of the odor as a public nuisance.
That legal tactic has been tried just a handful of times in the Rochester area in recent decades, the Democrat and Chronicle has found. But sometimes even a public nuisance suit fails to do the trick.
New York state and the town government each filed public-nuisance suits against the meat-rendering plant in the late 1980s, for instance. The suits were settled and the situation improved — for a while.
Today residents of the neighborhoods near the north end of Ellison Park are assailing Baker Commodities and town and state environmental officials with complaints about resurgent odors and concerns about health impacts.
Bob Reid, who lives less than a half-mile from Baker Commodities, is fond of likening its odorous releases to "a diabolical barbeque."
Reid questions whether government officials are serious about helping.
"They don't want to do anything unless all the canaries in the coal mine die," he said.
A short history of stink
Baker Commodities is on the hot seat now, but they're hardly the first.
In its day, Monroe County's Van Lare sewage treatment plant was a first-class stinker. Odors from open settling tanks and a sludge-burning incinerator at the plant near Lake Ontario antagonized residents of nearby homes in Irondequoit and prompted hundreds of calls a month to a special hotline.
It got so bad that the Irondequoit town supervisor filed misdemeanor charges in 1976 against then-county manager Lucien Morin and his public-works commissioner for violating a town anti-odor ordinance.
Sewage treatment plants, of which there once were dozens in Monroe County alone, are a common source of complaints. So too are landfills, which also used to be tucked into nooks and crannies everywhere.
Now there are only a few, though landfills continue to generate odor complaints.
A Facebook page was launched a few years ago to air grievances about odors from the sprawling High Acres landfill in Perinton.
Concerns have eased recently, but complaints did arise last winter when cold conditions closed down the pipes that usually suck up the landfill gas before it can escape, town Supervisor Michael Barker said.
Over the years, noxious odors have also emanated from less obvious sources.
In 1990, for instance, office workers in a pocket of downtown Rochester found themselves teary-eyed and gagging from an overpowering rotten-egg smell. Investigation fingered hydrogen sulfide in exhaust air from a sewer tunnel under construction.
A big mound of glass containers at a recycling plant in the Wyoming County village of Attica made residents' lives an olfactory hell for much of 2012 when sugary residue in unwashed beer and soda bottles began to ferment.
A quarter-century ago, angry Irondequoitans and town officials went after a wholesale-retail operation that smelled too strongly of its primary offering — fish.
Manufacturing operations of various kinds have been frequent suspects. Eastman Kodak Co.'s once sprawling complex in northwest Rochester and Greece, ringed all too closely by homes, at times was accused of all sorts of odorous offenses.
Diaz Chemical in Holley, Orleans County, bowled over an entire neighborhood with a nighttime release of a little-understood but extremely pungent chemical compound in January 2002. It was noticeable 15 miles away, and some Holley residents fled their homes, never to return.
But ironically, the factory that may have drawn the most complaints was one whose best-known product was supposed to smell good. That would be Kleen-Brite Laboratories, an erstwhile Brockport manufacturer and packager of detergents and household cleaners.
For years, neighbors ranted about pungent odors from the plant caused by the manufacture of fabric softener sheets.
The company, which never fully resolved the odor problem, went out of business in 2001.
A century of smells
Baker Commodities, surrounded by woods and wetlands, is nearly invisible to outsiders.
But it's not unnoticeable. Dead farm animals and wildlife, discarded or spoiled meat and other fatty materials are trucked in, as is used grease and oil from restaurant kitchens. Baker Commodities heats and cooks it, turning it into usable products such as tallow, animal feed and biodiesel fuel.
As the company acknowledges, its most obvious byproduct is odor.
"One of the rendering industry's biggest challenges, always, are nuisance odors … simply by virtue of what we do," said executive vice president Mathias Dahmen. "Technologies and regulations for treating these odors change over time, and we do everything possible to stay current and compliant."
Baker Commodities, a California company with 21 rendering plants, bought the facility in 1982. Online news stories document odor complaints at Baker plants in Oregon, California, Montana and Washington.
The Penfield facility is said to be the only rendering plant in New York. It employs 56 people, Dahmen said.
The company says it epitomizes sustainability, making use of wastes that otherwise would be buried in landfills or dumped down the drain.
The land now occupied by Baker Commodities in Penfield's Irondequoit Valley was used to make fertilizer from animal bones as far back as 1892, according to a company history.
While Baker strives to be a good neighbor where it operates and tries to respond to neighbors' concerns, Dahmer noted the Penfield plant was there first. "Our facility was in place for more than a century and the community grew around it, fully aware of our presence," he said.
The Stappenbeck family, which founded the modern operation, bought the bone works along Irondequoit Creek in 1910. At that time, the area was mostly farmland and swamps; property records and old maps indicate there were fewer than 10 homes within a half-mile of Stappenbeck at that time.
Since then, however, many more people moved within olfactory range of the plant's sometimes-gamey output. A couple of dozen homes were built within a quarter-mile of the facility in the 1920s and '30s, but a much larger number went up during the post-World War II suburban boom.
By the mid-1960s, there were roughly 300 single-family homes and 350 apartment units within a half-mile of the rendering plant.
While it's not desirable to have so many residences close to a source of strong odors, there's no way to prevent it, said Jim Costello, Penfield's developmental services director.
"In this particular case they determined back in God-knows-when — the 1940s, I would guess — that this part of town would be zoned residential," he said. "Once that is set, you're really almost obligated to allow the development to occur."
Trying to block development under those circumstances likely would result in a lawsuit, he said.
Costello said the town would never allow a rendering plant to be built today on Baker Commodities' property, which also was assigned a residential zoning classification years ago. But because the rendering plant pre-dated the zoning, it's allowed to remain in place so long as it doesn't expand.
Costello, who has worked for Penfield for 34 years, remembers a few occasions when builders came to the town for permission to build homes in the odor zone. Town officials simply warned them of the rendering plant's presence and gave them needed permits.
"The expectation is the builder would share that with the prospective buyer — say 'Oh, by the way, down the hill is a rendering plant,' " said Tony LaFountain, the Penfield town supervisor. Whether builders have warned buyers isn't clear; neither is it known if homeowners who sell existing homes are warning buyers.
"From a personal standpoint, it would seem to be the right thing to do to share that," LaFountain said.
By the mid-1960s, agitation over rendering odors had begun. Then, as now, the epicenter of complaint was along Parkview Drive, which runs atop a ridge to the east and northeast of the plant. That places the 130 homes on Parkview and several side streets directly downwind of the plant.
By the late 1960s Stappenbeck answered criticism by agreeing to install new odor control equipment, but that proved a stop-gap. The early 1970s brought more agitation and more new equipment, and things got better — for a while.
Conditions have cycled like that for decades.
"There are odors they try to keep contained … and over the years they have been more successful at times and less successful at times," said LaFountain.
The latest successful stretch ended in 2005, neighbors said. Foul odors aren't as frequent as in the worst periods of the past, but are still objectionable. Residents compile a list of their odor reports and send them to the town. The list has well over 150 complaints so far in 2014.
"The last year or two, but especially this year, it's a strong pungent smell again," said John Rydberg, who has lived near the plant for 35 years.
Nearly all of the complaints come from the Parkview Drive neighborhood, where a core group of activist residents solicit them. They do not know whether odors plague other neighborhoods near the plant, and have asked officials to conduct a survey to find out.
Those residents met regularly for a time with LaFountain and other town officials, and have engaged the state Department of Environmental Conservation.
With a petition bearing more than 130 signatures, neighbors asked the DEC to study air releases and determine whether any toxic contaminants were being released along with the odors. They also want a third-party odor control expert brought in and penalties imposed for egregious releases.
The DEC, which has been fielding complaints about Baker Commodities for many years, is looking into the situation again. The agency said it has inspected the facility several times this summer and has persuaded Baker to hire an outside consultant.
Dahmen, the company spokesman, said Baker improved its air scrubber system last year and is continuing to work on it. "Residents should notice a significant decrease in the years to come with this new technology in place," he said.
Healey, who has some experience in the business of odor control, said he believes Baker has scaled back use of its thermal oxidizer, or TO, which has a combustion chamber to cleanse air of odors before it's released to the atmosphere.
Dahmen said Healey's postulate is "not based in fact."
But Reid said the odor problem has "gotten worse and worse" over the last year, not better, and he remains a skeptic about the effectiveness of government officials.
"The town is probably not going to do much. I don't know if the DEC is going to demand some enhancement of their equipment or procedures or not," he said.
SORR@DemocratandChronicle.com
MCDERMOT@DemocratandChronicle.com
About the reporters
Steve Orr is a member of the Democrat and Chronicle investigations team and has been a staff writer since 1981. For much of that time he has covered environmental issues — including facilities like landfills and wastewater treatment plants that often give rise to odor complaints.
Meaghan McDermott also is a member of the investigations team and has been with the Democrat and Chronicle since 1998. She specializes in suburban issues, and has focused on Greece and the western side of Monroe County for a number of years.