Vallejo neighborhood plagued by stench from wastewater treatment plant

By Kelsi Thorud

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    VALLEJO, California (KPIX) — A project to repair a portion of a wastewater treatment plant in Vallejo is causing a stench in the surrounding area, and residents aren’t happy with the projected timeline.

When Christine Brown and her husband moved to Vallejo back in 2018, they immediately fell in love.

“People are really nice. You know, if you say hi to people on the street and it doesn’t matter like what their background is, where they are on the kind of socioeconomic scale, people say, ‘Hi, how are you.’ You know, it’s just a very down-to-earth kind of place,” said Brown.

They live in a beautiful historic Victorian in the Heritage District with a big backyard where Brown said her husband grows fruit and a lot of hot peppers.

“These are the white Thai’s, and then what else is there, blood ghost, which is such a Halloween-y name, the Aji pineapple, and what else is here, oh solar flare. Those are his favorite ones,” said Brown.

Brown said everything was going great for the first few years, but around 2020, it all changed.

“It’s really, really bad. Like it’s nauseating, I mean you can’t really even open the door without being like hit in the face this smell, and it smells like a broken sewer line,” said Brown.

She said, for the past four years, the air outside her home smells so bad so often that she can’t even enjoy her back yard.

The cause she said is a nearby wastewater treatment plant.

“The issue is it comes up and it hits us in Heritage as I said maybe 40 to 60 percent of the time,” said Brown.

The city’s Wastewater District said it is repairing a portion of the plant and that is the cause of the smell.

They said the project is slated to be completed by November. But during weeks with temperatures in the high 90s, like the Bay Area is currently seeing, Brown said the stench only gets worse.

“It’s an 1896 house. 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’ve got everything shut down because you can’t have the windows open because it’s just that bad,” said Brown.

She said she and people she has talked to in Vallejo find the city’s timeline unacceptable. She wants the problem fixed now but said sadly she isn’t too confident it’ll even be fixed by the fall.

“The smell is bad enough, but that coupled with sort of the feeling of the community being disrespected, not listened to, not cared about, that’s I think the really big issue,” said Brown.

KPIX reached out to the Vallejo Flood and Wastewater District for comment. They have not yet responded.

As for Brown, she said she doesn’t know how much longer she and her husband can take it. They may have to end up moving, which is an option she knows not everyone in town has.

“What’s important is what happens for the people who live here, who have lived here forever, who’s families, parents, grandparents, aunts, uncles live here. It should be good for everybody whether we choose to stay or not choose to stay,” said Brown.

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