MARYSVILLE – Complaints are surfacing once again about an offensive odor wafting through neighborhoods, and some again believe it is coming from Cedar Grove Composting in Everett.
Mike Davis of Marysville said the odor was especially bad last weekend and Monday. It smelled the same as the stink he’s been enduring the past four or five summers, he said.
“It had that rotting corpse smell that is unbrearable,” he said.
Officials at the Puget Sound Clean Air Agency, which has jurisdiction over offensive smells, said they have received 12 complaints in the area since May 10. It has yet to definitively trace any of the complaints to Cedar Grove, an official said.
To pin an odor complaint to a particular source, the Clear Air Agency must send an investigator to trace the smell from the place of the call while the odor is still present.
Still, there’s a good possibility the smell is coming from the composting facility, said Mario Pedroza, managing supervising inspector for the Clean Air Agency.
The other odor producers in the area, such as the Marysville wastewater plant, have characteristic odors that are easily distinguished from Cedar Grove, he said.
“The odor’s still there, the people still smell it,” he said.
Numerous complaints were received two years ago and at least three times the Clean Air Agency traced the smell to Cedar Grove.
Over the winter of 2008-09, the company spent several hundred thousand dollars on trees and doors for its large, raw compost holding building. Complaints dropped last summer from the year before but many residents say they still smelled the same smell. One of the complaints last summer was traced to Cedar Grove.
Company officials have not yet been reached for comment Thursday.
Bill Sheets: 425-339-3439; sheets@heraldnet.com.
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