Jasper County residents deal with troubling and persistent smell

Over the last few months, an area encompassing parts of Webb City, Carterville, and the Heritage Acres area has intermittently experienced a noxious and overpowering odor.

Some have compared it to sewage. Others have suggested it might be the product of animal litter or solid waste used to fertilize fields.

Local officials say they’ve received scores of complaints, but on their own, they have not been able to bring the problem to any resolution.

State Senator Jill Carter says finding solutions and taking in the concerns and needs of all parties and the state as a whole can be a difficult job. “How can this be a win-win for everyone?” she asks.

“How can our farmers utilize this resource that contains something that our food industry needs to get rid of?

“I mean, if it doesn’t go somewhere, then it puts them out of business,” she continues.  “Nobody wants those jobs to go away. We need the food industry. So how do we come to some kind of reconciliation? “

Citizen complain about smell

One person who has experienced the smell in the Webb City-Carterville area is Julie Smith. She and her husband run a construction business.

“I can tell you during the construction of two of our homes just off of Prosperity Road, we actually have had subcontractors get sick and vomit due to the smell,” Smith says. “It smells like human waste.”

“I actually met with a client at a house that we’re constructing just off of Prosperity Road and HH Highway,” Smith adds.

“When they got out of the car they said, wow, what is that smell? It’s terrible. We definitely don’t want to build here.”

Municipal reactions

The cities that have taken the full brunt of the noxious odor are Webb City, Carterville and adjacent areas.

City Administrator Carl Francis says they’re not sure of the source of the odor, but they have some very good ideas.

He says they suspect that the smell is coming from a legally permitted business that has been granted a sludge permit by the Department of Natural Resources.

“Our argument is not so much with the business.” Francis says. “Our argument is with the Department of Natural Resources having no authority to monitor or do anything about the odor coming from any of those projects because they consider it to be agriculture in nature.

“We think there should be legislation that allows the governing body of a municipality to investigate the odor, in other words, enter onto the permitted premises in order to verify or not verify the source of the odor because a municipality can still prosecute for noxious odors even though the smell emanates or starts from outside our city limits.

The DNR has provided us with copies of permits for such operations, but we do not have the authority to enter onto those properties.”

C & L Grease: Convenient Patsy?

Some other citizens and municipal leaders have targeted a possible source for the odor.  They have claimed its C&L Grease and Wastewater Services, LLC.

But Michelle Wald of C& L, says “not so fast.”

“It seems that people are smelling this from Webb City all the way to Carthage and even El Dorado Springs, mostly in the morning and the evening.  We do not land apply anything in the evening EVER. It is against Missouri Department of Natural Resources regulations,” Wald says.

“I think the most important aspect of this is that due to social media when the odor is reported it is usually attributed to our company.  This limits the investigation with DNR to only our facility and they can’t fully investigate other companies/situations.

“Another large part of the puzzle is that DNR does not have an adequate system for finding who is land applying and where.  They were not even aware there was another company doing land application right next door to us until we told them.  DNR also allows waste hauling companies to land apply under other people’s permits as  a contract hauler.

So companies like Denali Water Solutions can still land apply in Missouri under their customers’ DNR permits despite multiple Clean Water Act violations and permit revocation[s] in the state.”

C&L Grease has been investigated for odor reports on multiple occasions over several years, without violation.

Evidence of this is a report by Jackson Winslow with MO DNR from June 25, 2024. He wrote:

“We are no longer investigating this facility because we have visited to address odor concerns multiple times and we have yet to observe 7:1 detections of odor.”

Sludge: Part of a larger problem?

Another possible source for the smell in Jasper County and other locations in Missouri is something called sludge. 

Carolyn Pufalt, a volunteer for the Sierra Club, says there are three sources. One is municipal waste, most commonly found in sewage treatment plants and anything else that can be dumped down the sink.

A second source is urine, feces, blood and other by products of agricultural waste, often found in Confined Animal Feeding operations or CAFOs, for short.

Finally, there are animal and vegetable waste products  that come from the overflow from slaughterhouses, from restaurants, food processing plants and other businesses.

Following that comes a transformation when this seemingly toxic mix of products changes into something else.

“The sludge is usually put in some kind of a settling pond for a while, and then when it is solid enough it is considered an agricultural manure-based sludge and can be used as farmers for fertilizer. ”

One company involved in the sludge business is Arkansas-based Denali Water Solutions. Published reports say Denali made agreements with  Denali to create open-air lagoons filled with sludge that reportedly contained animal parts and wastewater from meat and poultry processing facilities.

One lagoon contained 13 million gallons of waste.  Denali is just one of many companies in the Show-Me State and around the nation to work with sludge that is often given at no cost to farmers.

The result of the sludge lagoons and sludge on fields was a powerful smell that alarmed residents of Newton and McDonald Counties in 2023.  This led to the creation of a community group known as Stop Land Use Damaging our Ground and Environment or SLUDGE for short.

The group reportedly sued the Department of Natural Resources to make it regulate Denali as a solid waste management company due to concerns odor and water contamination.  Denali agreed to pay a fine of over $21,000 for violating clean water regulations with lagoons in McDonald and Macon counties.

But even where it is used, opinions are often divided. One one side, landowners and residents are bothered by the smell but sludge does contain valuable substances as a fertilizer.

“Throughout history, farmers have always used their manure as a source for fertilizer,” Pufalt states. “It just makes sense that if you put waste out on a field, it doesn’t smell good. Often, the problem is in over application.

Sludge contains phosphorus and nitrogen, two nutrients plans used but the concentrations can be hundreds or thousands of times the recommended amount.

No discussion of sludge could end without discussing potentially harmful per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances (PFAS),  a group of man-made chemicals that are resistant to heat, oil, grease, and water that it might contain.

Some fear these substances could potentially could leach into the water supply.

Legislation as an answer

For the time-being, Webb City, Carterville and other municipalities are caught in a “Catch 22 — difficult  circumstance from which there is no escape because of mutually conflicting or dependent conditions.

Webb City legally can sue but it the law bars it from crossing property lines to investigate possible sources of smell that have led to hundreds of complaints to the city and the DNR.

The DNR inherited the problem early in 2013 when the Missouri Fertilizer Control Board transferred the authority to regulate sludge to the Department after finding the waste material “did not have significant economic market value.”

At the time 13 companies were spreading waste in Missouri from 129 sources, including poultry plants, pet food companies, dairies and other operations in Missouri and seven neighboring states. Later, the DNR issued permit exemptions to companies previously licensed by the board.  Those companies must now seek permits or find other ways to dispose of the waste.

Missouri State Senator Jill Carter says addressing the problem with legislation happened last year with positive results.

“There is a concerted effort to meet with everybody to try to get on the same page and come to a resolution, Carter says. “We did get legislation passed with some of the land application of waste water that was impacting a lot of the district in the southern part of Newton County.”

“We were able to pass legislation that put clear restrictions on the land application of industrial waste water through manufacturing companies of mostly food to make sure that there was testing and that it was safe and there were restrictions on land application. We got that through the Senate and the House last year passed that into law.”

Carter says from here it could be an uphill battle.

“Getting legislation passed on top of what we got last year would be difficult this year simply because they’re still promulgating rules for the regulations that that industrial wastewater falls under.

“Probably the question in everybody’s mind here at the Capitol would be: Why are we passing legislation again when CNR hasn’t even promulgated the rules to make land application be in compliance with the rules we passed last year.”

Carter says any future legislation has to take into account the needs of all parties involved minus political considerations.

“It’s a complicated issue and one that definitely needs addressed,” she says. “I mean, that’s trying to get everybody to just understand that the politics of it isn’t at all what we’re competing for. It is trying to ensure that our communities are safe.”

Where does that leave Jasper County residents?

In Jasper County, especially the cities of Webb City, Carterville and Carthage, one problem is the abutment of thousands of acres of farmland with municipalities.

But first, legislators must discuss and debate this complicated issue, keeping in mind that most people, as consumers, use the wide variety of animal and agricultural products that help create many the substances that end up in sludge.

Passing laws that will protect the rights of urban and suburban residents as well as farmers who use sludge and companies that create the byproducts that have to be disposed of somewhere could prove to be a tricky balancing act.

NewsTalk KZRG will continue to monitor  the situation and will continue report what we find for as long as the smell lasts and residents, legislators, environmentalists and industries deal with the situation.

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