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A "No Stink" Celebration in Cville

You rarely hear the words “sewage” and “picnic” in the same sentence, but strange things happen in Charlottesville.  The local water and sewer authority hosted a mid-day party this week to celebrate the end of the odors caused by a sewage treatment facility. 

The historic neighborhoods east of downtown Charlottesville have put up with the odor of sewage for a hundred years according to area resident and community organizer Bill Emory.  He arrived in 1987 and has been stuck with the stench ever since.

“You just get used to it as a fact of life," he says. " So it was the stinky neighborhood, but it was really when you had a visitor from out of town or your children had someone over from school that one was reminded again of just how intense it was.”

Sewage was stored in a green area along the Rivanna River, and waste sometimes overflowed according to Gary O’Connell, a board member with the Rivanna Water and Sewer Authority.

“We get rain that gets into the sanitary sewer, and then it doesn’t have any place to go, and so it just backs up,” he says.

Albemarle County Supervisor Ann Mallek joins residents for a picnic lunch in celebration of a new "stink-free" neighborhood.

Then Allison Ewing, an architect who lived in the neighborhood, had an idea.  If she could find a place far from any homes at the same altitude as the current sewage station, the waste could easily be carried away through a pipe.

“Holy cow!" she recalls. "The  Rivanna Water and Sewer Authority is at the same elevation!”

That’s right.  It made perfect sense to send the sewage onto the processing plant for storage there, and that, says engineering and maintenance director Jennifer Whitaker, is exactly what they did.

“We bored a tunnel through the mountain that sits between this park and our plant," she explains, "and we now gravity flow completely to the treatment plant, and we’re able to handle all of the flow at the treatment plant.”

So now the neighborhood smells sweet, and the authority hosted a picnic along the river to celebrate.