MARYSVILLE — It has a distinct bass note of vintage Everett rendering plant, playful hints of dirty diapers and anaerobic sludge, and a long, lingering crematorium finish.
Others say the aroma that’s engulfed parts of Marysville just plain stinks.
City leaders say the odor that’s assaulted the city so hard in recent weeks has residents reeling and retching.
“Some days it’s so bad, I personally get next to upchucking,” said Joe Taiariol, who lives near Jennings Memorial Park.
One day, “it actually permeated my clothes,” he said. “It’s foul.”
The Puget Sound Clean Air Agency, which has jurisdiction over bad smells that don’t come from obvious industrial sources, has yet to officially declare the source of the stench. An official from the agency, however, has twice traced the smell to Cedar Grove Composting on Smith Island, just west of Highway 529 between Everett and Marysville. The operation, which turns yard and food waste into garden compost, opened in 2004.
Mario Pedroza, a supervising inspector for the Clean Air Agency, issued a warning to the company Wednesday.
“I cannot discount the fact that what I smelled that day was unpleasant and they were it,” Pedroza said.
Jerry Bartlett, vice president of Cedar Grove Composting, said the stink is not necessarily coming from the company’s operation. He noted there are other potential sources of smells nearby, including companies with mulching and bark operations, and the Everett and Marysville sewage treatment plants.
“There have been a lot of different descriptions from a lot of people,” Bartlett said, noting that some have said the odor resembles bark or manure, neither of which is handled by Cedar Grove.
The company and the agency each plan to investigate the other possible sources, officials said.
Further measures could include giving the olfactory offender a ticket, Pedroza said. This would set in motion a 30-day timetable for action to be taken or for the company to face possible fines, which can range up to $15,000, though that amount is not likely in this case, he said.
Pedroza doesn’t believe the smell is dangerous — it likely is coming from organic matter, is not toxic and not contain pathogens, he said.
Still, some have said they actually feel physical discomfort from the smell, Marysville Mayor Dennis Kendall said in a letter to the Clean Air Agency. City spokesman Doug Buell said the city has received 80 or 90 calls and a half-dozen e-mails the past couple of weeks about the smell.
People have described it as “causing pain in their lungs, and making it hard to breathe,” Kendall wrote. “Others said at its worst, the smell caused stinging in their eyes.”
Marysville’s sewage plant is about a mile north of Cedar Grove. Pedroza said he visited the treatment plant on June 30 and, while he did smell the plant, he noticed a stronger smell coming from off-site.
“We turned our nose upwind and followed it to Cedar Grove Composting,” he said.
Cedar Grove also operates a facility in Maple Valley, southeast of Renton in King County. This operation has received numerous odor complaints from neighbors and incurred multiple fines from the Clean Air Agency since it opened in 1988, officials said.
A fine resulted from a complaint against the Maple Valley plant, which the company can reduce by making improvements to its pre-compost storage and grinding system there, according to Bartlett. It’s working to do so, he said.
The operation in Maple Valley uses an older, open-air composting system, Bartlett said.
In Everett, food and yard waste from Snohomish County and north King County gets trucked to Cedar Grove’s Smith Island facility. The organic waste is stored, ground up and spread out in rows, covered by a GORE-TEX material that speeds composting and controls odors, Bartlett said.
Pedroza said he traced the smell to the grinder, not to the composting piles.
Some who’ve been in the path of the stink say it’s been around for a few years, but it’s been especially bad the past month or two.
Perhaps coincidentally, or not, Bartlett said Cedar Grove’s composting operation hit peak volume for the year in June.
Residents said the smell was at its worst during the warm weather at the end of June and the beginning of July.
It shifts with the wind, sometimes sweeping through Sunnyside to the east, sometimes swinging north or northeast into downtown Marysville and beyond.
“It just rolls right up this hill,” said Wendy McKenna, who lives in the Northpointe area at Grove Street and 78th Drive NE, near Highway 9, several miles from Smith Island.
McKenna said her neighbor, a nurse, described the smell as resembling diarrhea.
Reggie Shirey of Everett, who frequently travels to Marysville with his wife for church, said the smell reminds him of a rendering plant that operated in Everett in the 1960s.
“It smells like a bunch of sour garbage,” Shirey said. “Bad compost.”
Taiariol’s wife, Louise, said the smell reminds her of a crematorium in Idaho.
Wherever it’s coming from, it won’t likely get fixed overnight, Pedroza said. It’s an extensive process to prove an odor is coming from any one place. Then it’s a matter of allowing the company or agency time to make changes, especially if those changes involve expenditures and construction, Pedroza said.
“There’s a lot of work here to do,” he said.
Bartlett said his company is taking the complaints seriously, both at Smith Island and in Maple Valley.
“We’ll work on it because we are concerned about it,” he said.
Reporter Bill Sheets: 425-339-3439 or sheets@heraldnet.com.
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