WHAT'S THAT SMELL?

SOUTH BEND — Imagine a skunk that sprayed the inside of an outhouse. It’s enough to make your nostrils snap shut in self-defense.
A similar noxious odor was wafting Friday morning from the sewers in the neighborhood around St. Adalbert School on the city’s west side.

“Most of our classrooms have no air conditioning,’’ Principal Jeny Sejdinaj wrote in an e-mail to The Tribune, “so windows are open to let the cool air in.’’
But the open windows also let in the nauseating odor.

“How are our children supposed to learn while holding their noses or suffering headaches from this?” Sejdinaj asked. “How are our teachers supposed to teach?”
One teacher, she said, moved her students from their third-floor classroom to the first-floor lunchroom to escape the stench.

Sejdinaj was fed up enough Friday morning to start making phone calls. She called the mayor’s office and asked that Mayor Stephen Luecke call her back. She called the Department of Public Works, she said, which transferred her to the Division of Environmental Services.
She called the county Health Department, which transferred her to the sewer department. Someone there told her the sewer department had done some deodorizing, but the person she needed to talk to was on vacation.

But Sejdinaj said he told her that the problem stems from a discharge from the New Energy Co. of Indiana, an ethanol plant located about a mile south of St. Adalbert School. The company flushes waste products into the sewers, where they flow through South Bend’s west side on their way to the Waste Water Treatment Plant on Riverside Drive.

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A nauseating and obnoxious odor, emitting from the local ethanol factory in South Bend, IN. That ethanol plant flushes some of its toxic waste into the sewers, which probably flow to the TAX PAYER supported water treatment plant.

But people in Webster County won't have the luxury of letting their ethanol factory flush its toxic waste into the sewer lines.

They'll have to deal with above ground storage ponds to handle the ethanol factory waste water. And hope and pray that a gully washer type rain doesn't hit the waste water ponds. If one does--like the one we had several weeks ago--then that waste water will be spread out to the surrounding area, impacting homes and their inhabitants.
Then, the toxic brew will slowly sink into the Ozark Aquifer, to be enjoyed by all.