Complaints of ‘horrendous’ smell lead Fort Worth to clean up its act on sewage sludge
When she first noticed the odors, Georgina Holzmeier thought that a neighbor’s cow had died near her home just outside of Grandview in Johnson County.
“It was so horrendous that we were actually driving the road to see if there was a dead body at the end of the street, because that’s what it smells like,” Holzmeier said, reflecting on that day almost 10 years ago. “Keep in mind that most of the people out here, we’re used to living in the country. We’re used to the smell of cow poop and horses and animals … The country smell is not decomposing bodies.”
The cause of the problem? The “sewage sludge,” or biosolids, provided to landowners to fertilize their farms through programs run by the city of Fort Worth and the Trinity River Authority. Most residents have directed their complaints toward Fort Worth’s biosolids program, which for decades has applied sewage sludge to thousands of acres of farmland each year.
Biosolids programs have been championed by cities across the United States as a way to recycle waste after it is processed and rid of disease-causing bacteria. In Fort Worth, all sludge is treated at the Village Creek Water Reclamation Facility before being given to the city’s contractor to apply to farms in surrounding communities, including Johnson, Hill and Wise counties.
The product is in high demand from farmers due to its nutritional benefits for soil and cheaper price when compared to commercial fertilizer. Many landowners have joined waiting lists to receive biosolids once or twice per year.
But over the past decade, as rural counties surrounding Fort Worth have grappled with rapid population growth, residents have spoken out against the notorious odors that can linger for weeks or even months after the sludge has been applied to farmland.
Those issues have led Fort Worth officials to take action, starting with changing its contractor from Renda Environmental to Synagro, which took over in April. The city is also planning to spend at least $65 million to build a new biosolids drying facility and reform its process for creating the product in the hopes of eliminating odors.
“We want to do better, we want to have better material,” said Steve Nutter, Fort Worth’s environmental program manager. “We do not want to be out causing problems in our surrounding communities. We’re dedicated toward making improvements with infrastructure and management practices to make sure that happens.”
Since taking office in 2015, Johnson County Commissioner Larry Woolley has fielded consistent complaints about the smell stemming from land where biosolids were applied. The county’s transition from rural to increasingly urban, with a population of about 175,000 people, is part of the reason why there are more people living in the vicinity of the odors, Woolley said.
In addition, agricultural producers in the area are typically renting the land from absentee owners. The farmer lives elsewhere and is “unaffected by the odors,” Woolley said, whereas their neighbors “live with it 24 hours a day.”
Before Synagro took over the biosolids contract, the county south of Fort Worth received the largest amount of biosolids, coming in at about 12,226 tons in 2017-2018, according to city data. Beyond the amount of sludge, the product is meant to be dry when it arrives to the fields but is often wet, which exacerbates the odors, Woolley added.
“More times than not, 80, 90 percent of the time, it comes as a wet sludge product that has obviously not been processed properly, and therefore the odors are much more potent and last much longer,” Woolley said.
He and other commissioners have unsuccessfully petitioned the state for local control of waste dumping and, most recently, passed a May resolution asking Fort Worth to stop distributing biosolids until the city could confirm that the product could not transmit COVID-19. The resolution also mentioned the “noxious odors” reducing quality of life for residents.
In response, Mayor Betsy Price sent a May 11 letter outlining the steps that Fort Worth is taking to address concerns about the biosolids program. She noted that the city has not applied biosolids in Johnson County since at least April and that modern wastewater treatment plants disinfect and kill pathogens that could spread the virus.
More important, Price wrote, the city is planning to build a thermal dryer facility that will “significantly reduce” the amount of biosolids that are applied each day by about 70 to 80 percent. That facility has a total budget of $58 million, with Synagro required to finish the project by July 2022.
“A thermal dryer will produce a superior Class A product that is highly marketable and can be sold through multiple outlets,” Price wrote.
The new biosolids product will likely come in the form of pellets, which could be sold in stores like Home Depot or Walmart, said Chuck Simmons, regional technical services director for Synagro. The contractor has not made final decisions on how the pelletized fertilizer will be marketed or sold.
Fort Worth has also spent $7 million on a 5 million gallon storage tank to solve another problem: the stockpiling of sludge during wet weather periods, when the city is forbidden by law to apply biosolids to land. The tank is nearly ready for use, potentially coming online by late July or August, according to Nutter.
“When it’s raining and soil is saturated, we can use the 5 million gallon storage tank to hold the digested solids so therefore we don’t have stockpiles of biosolids sitting around getting smelly,” Nutter said. “We’re very excited about that, and I think that’s going to be a huge help for us.”
Renda took many of the city’s biosolids sites with it when Fort Worth switched contractors, Nutter said, and Synagro has contracts with only three fields in Johnson County.
The Trinity River Authority, which still contracts with Renda to apply biosolids in counties surrounding Fort Worth, is also working to adjust its process and produce a pasteurized product with “negligible” odors, said Vanassa Joseph, a spokeswoman for the TRA. Until they can speak with Johnson County leaders about the odor concerns, TRA officials will keep land application sites in the county out of the biosolids rotation, she said.
Woolley is optimistic that these changes will produce less potent smells for both long-time residents and people who are moving to the area. Holzmeier has already noticed a decrease in odors near her home, but she doesn’t attribute that shift to any change in the biosolids program.
“In my particular area, the land development and people selling off the land for homeowners is probably going to be more effective in decreasing odors,” Holzmeier said. “Now, those poor souls that are living up 35, I don’t know. Even if they can just get it to smell natural, it would be better.”
Luke Ranker contributed reporting to this article.
