Moberly’s efforts to combat odor complaints show progress, but concerns remain

MOBERLY, Mo. (KMIZ)

Nearly a year after receiving its first of two odor complaints from the Missouri Department of Natural Resources, the City of Moberly claims it is “moving in the right direction.” 

Moberly received its first violation last from the DNR in November and a second warning in January, due to an order stemming from a wastewater-holding basin off Rollins Street near Highway 63. At the time, the city blamed animal fat from a nearby meat-processing facility, Swift Prepared Foods, a subsidiary of JBS USA, and an ongoing drought over the summer as the cause of the odor. 

“It took us a while before we figured out what it was,” Moberly Capital Projects Manager Steve Wilson said. “We thought it was contributed to the drought, because of our combination system. It relies on, lots of stormwater coming through there. But then, we did some testing on it and found the animal fat.” 

Moberly was forced to submit a plan to the DNR in December outlining how it planned to deal with the odor. According to Wilson, since the second violation, Moberly ordered JBS Foods, to stop discharging animal fat into the city system, drained the basin twice, hired Ace Pipe to clean a 2,000-foot sanitation line and remove animal fat, added 4,000 feet of new pipe to redirect Swift Food’s waste into a new wastewater treatment facility and added two solar-powered aeration mixers into the basin to help relive the smell. 

Wilson said the city spent $400,000 on the project. However, JBS Foods was forced to pay the city back in full to cover the cost as part of a consent order.

"JBS stopped contributing water to the basin in question at the beginning of this year and there are no plans for water from our facility to enter it again in the future," a spokesperson for the company told ABC 17 in a statement. "JBS values our relationship with the City of Moberly, and we worked hand-in-hand with state and local officials to reasonably address any role our operations may have had in contributing to the odor. We hope the significant actions we have taken to find and implement solutions supported by the local community will remove any further speculation about our role in contributing to the odor."

“I've been working with the wastewater treatment coordinator to communicate with the industry, [JBS Foods] often to make sure this doesn't happen again,” Public Utilities Director Shawn Middendorf said. “We're always watching and looking and smelling because we know the community's doing the same.” 

But not everyone is convinced that Swift Prepared Foods is to blame. Jayson Hardison, an Associate Pastor of Family Ministries at First Assembly of God in Moberly, said he has been living in the city for seven years and he noticed the smell when he first moved to the Magic City. 

“We’ve heard pretty much everything over the last seven years, but one thing that hasn’t changed is the smell,” Hardison said. “It smelled different when Swift started dumping, you know, stuff in there. It did, but it still smelled horrible prior to the Swift moving in.

Hardison said the smell has had a direct impact on his church, which sits across the street from the basin. 

“It's really bad when you have to tell people, ‘Hey, we're the church by the poop pond,’ because that's where everybody knows the directions to get here,” Hardison said. “Our congregation is not super happy on the Sunday mornings when they show up, and it smells horrible. The problem is that the smell would come inside the building and so we would have to open up all of our doors and turn fans on to try to get that smell out of there.” 

Hardison claims there has been a noticeable difference since the city began working to reduce the smell; but whenever Moberly goes weeks without rain, the smell returns. He added that on one occasion, a pastor asked to go home early during the week because he was getting sick from the odor. 

Records obtained by ABC 17 News also show several complaints have been sent to the DNR. One email from June 3 says that the smell made it “difficult to open a window” reading: 

“It’s not as strong as it used to be before Moberly City Hall claimed they were going to address the issues but it’s definitely strong enough to travel from the pond to my apartment complex when the wind is blowing westward. It’s really unpleasant and not something anyone I know cares to keep smelling” 

However, when the DNR went to investigate the next day, it determined that Moberly had not violated any odor regulation. Another complaint was sent on June 21 claiming that the smell went away and came back, adding that it was so bad they could smell it from their three-story apartment complex. The DNR came to Moberly to investigate on June 27 and once again no violations of Missouri Odor regulations were found. 

”The DNR came almost every month since January and we've been in compliance. I got a call just before I came in here that they were here just recently and they didn't they didn't register an odor violation,” Wilson told ABC 17 News on Monday. “They have been a great teammate for us going through this whole process and  I think we've moved in the right direction.” 

The city says it has a plan to continue and mitigate the smell. 

“What we plan to do moving forward is we're going to have the solids in the system removed from that basin,  organic material as it breaks down, causes odor. So we want to try to eliminate that as much as possible, and then we're going to lower the water level in the system so that hopefully there will be less odors as we move forward.”

But regardless of what the city does, there may a lingering odor may still remain. 

“This is a wastewater facility so you're going to have wastewater in the system as we go forward and you will have some odor, Hardison said. “What our job is to mitigate that as much as possible. So will it be perfect ever? I don’t know.”