MOSCOW, Ohio — A terrible stench from a coal waste landfill is causing headaches, breathing problems and nausea for some Washington Township residents who said their health and the smell have worsened since the WCPO 9 I-Team first reported on the odor in 2023.
“The second that you start smelling it, you feel like you are going to vomit. Immediately. It is so intense, it just takes over everything. It is awful,” said Rhonda Brittain, who lives across the street from the landfill with her husband, Brian.
The landfill was once a prime farmland in rural Clermont County. In the mid-1980s, then-Cincinnati Gas and Electric Company converted the troubled William H. Zimmer plant on the Ohio River from nuclear power to burn coal. It began buying up family farms a few miles away on the hill, to build a landfill for leftover coal ash with a massive perimeter around it.
WATCH: Residents tell us how the smell is impacting their lives
The county auditor’s site lists the total parcel size as 1,453 acres, with deep tree cover.
The I-Team first reported on this stench in April 2023, after residents said they couldn’t open their windows, eat meals outside or sit on their porches, and were forced to hold their breath when they drove past the landfill.
Now, three years later, residents said the stench has gotten worse.
“Over the years, it’s just gotten worse and worse and worse,” Rhonda Brittain said. “Before, it would be a couple of times a week. Now it’s almost every single night.”
Brittain said she gets intense heartburn and daily headaches that won’t subside, “no matter what I do.”
Her husband, Brian, suffers from sudden nausea that wakes him in the middle of the night, causing him to feel as if “you are going to puke all over the room,” and a lost his sense of smell.
The Southwest Ohio Air Quality Agency has received at least five complaints about the odor since January. The Ohio EPA has been to the landfill, but spokespersons from both agencies said they do not have jurisdiction over the bad smell.
There is also no state rule specifically identifying an odor threshold for hydrogen sulfide, an Ohio EPA spokesperson said.
Hydrogen sulfide is a gas that smells like rotten eggs. It can be toxic at high levels, and exposure to low concentrations may irritate the eyes, nose, or throat, cause difficulty breathing, headaches, tiredness, and balance problems, according to the U.S. EPA website.
The Southwest Ohio Air Quality Agency has not conducted hydrogen sulfide monitoring because the landfill ponds fall outside the scope of its odor nuisance enforcement, said spokesperson Kerri Castlen.
“What’s being described here is unacceptable. People should not have to live with this level of odor and harm to their daily lives,” said Thom Cmar, deputy managing attorney for the Midwest office of Earthjustice, the nation’s largest legal environmental nonprofit. “This should be something that state agencies, especially the Ohio EPA, should be doing something about on their own.”
An Ohio EPA spokesperson referred WCPO to the U.S. EPA, which has oversight because it is a coal combustion residual landfill.
WCPO reached out to the U.S. EPA on May 19, but more than a week later, had not received information about the landfill.
Zimmer’s owner, Texas-based Vistra Corp., closed the coal plant on May 31, 2022. It was the sixth coal-burning power plant in the region to close since 2013.
But Vistra kept the Zimmer landfill open so it could receive Zimmer’s leftover coal waste and sludge from the Miami Fort Generating Station in North Bend, which Vistra also owns.
“It’s not surprising that this type of issue would pop up in a landfill like this, especially when they are still disposing of waste in the site,” Cmar said.
The Ohio EPA issued a permit to Vistra on May 11, 2022, allowing workers to remove buried coal waste from a runoff pond at the Zimmer plant and take it to the landfill. This would allow the company to rebuild a clay soil liner to comply with federal laws.
At around that time, residents said the odor from the landfill became much worse, especially at night, in the early morning hours, and after it rained, with the intensity and frequency of the odor worsening until now.
“We smell the stench, as we call it, all the time. We’re nauseous from it constantly. It’s like we can’t get away from it,” Rhonda Brittain said.
“Sometimes, where we’re at, it lasts for days,” said Brian Brittain.
Joyce Long said she smells the stench while driving on State Route 756 from her home in Felicity.
“It was so bad, I’d roll up my window and try to hold my breath through it until I got past Fruit Ridge Road, and it was so bad I couldn’t do it,” Long said.
Vistra spokesperson Jenny Lyon described the waste from Miami Fort as “a limestone-based byproduct consisting primarily of silica and other naturally occurring particulates, such as river sediment, that are not removed during the gypsum washing process.”
But Cmar said it was “scrubber sludge.”
“Essentially, it’s the sulfur that gets stripped out of the smokestack when the power plant burns coal, so it has a very high sulfur content,” Cmar said. “It’s well documented that when you dispose of that in a landfill, there may be chemical reactions that occur that would generate these types of sulfuric acids.”
Ohio EPA spokesperson Dina Pierce said the Miami Fort material is not the source of the odor and confirmed it is being stored in a different section of the landfill.
Ohio EPA inspectors visited the Zimmer landfill on May 12. They said the company had isolated the odor source to a pipe that carries leachate from an older section of the landfill where the material includes flue gas desulfurization waste.
“This material contains a lot of sulfur, which can produce hydrogen sulfide odors (often described as 'rotten egg' odor) as it decomposes. The company is using multiple measures to control odors from the leachate in the sedimentation pond. FGD material is no longer disposed of in the landfill,” Pierce wrote in an email to WCPO.
Cmar said that FGD waste is another term for “scrubber sludge,” and he wasn’t surprised that it was causing the odor.
“Breathing high levels of hydrogen sulfide can be very harmful depending on the level of exposure,” Cmar said. “It can be everything from a bad smell or giving you a headache all the way up to serious lung damage, respiratory damage, or even brain damage."
Cmar said there is a clear failure by Vistra and state and local agencies to do all that is necessary to protect nearby residents from harm.
A Vistra spokesperson said the landfill uses multiple odor-mitigation systems and is closely monitoring conditions, while making adjustments to improve odor control.
“There have been no material changes to operations at the Zimmer landfill facility in the past three years,” said Lyon, the Vistra spokesperson. “Intermittent odors near the landfill can result from water or leachate coming from an inactive part of the landfill, which is collected in the sedimentation pond. At times, meteorological conditions may affect the intensity and movement of odors in the area.”
Residents said the odor is worst at night and in the mornings, especially after rain, dew, fog or heavy cloud cover. On some mornings, their cars are covered with white ash.
“It just depends on the weather and the way the wind blows, but most of what I smell is at night,” said Carla Benjamin, who lives a half mile from the landfill. “It smells a little bit like sulfur but more like raw sewer … and it seems like at night it penetrates through the windows.”
Benjamin even purchased new windows, but she said it didn’t block the stench from permeating into her home. She also worried about the perfumes Vistra uses to cover up the sulfur odor.
“This is not just a smell but chemical on top of chemical, on top of chemical, plus the lime and the ash, and that’s what’s causing poison in our ground, not just in the air,” Benjamin said. “Why aren’t they monitoring our ground wells to see what kind of contaminants are in there?”
Cmar urged residents to collect their own data and purchase hydrogen sulfide monitors to see what levels they are being exposed to.
“Sulfur smells near landfills are very common, and that is why a lot of landfills have much more extensive monitoring in place than what seems to be occurring here,” Cmar said.
Lyon said crews at the landfill continue to maintain and refine multiple odor mitigation systems, including pond aeration, perimeter neutralization systems, and a carbon filtration system.
“The site monitors these systems daily and works regularly with industry experts to evaluate and test additional technologies and equipment to improve reliability and overall odor control,” Lyon said.
But Cmar said Vistra should do more, because residents cannot live with such a terrible stench.
“The company is not going to do it on its own. They don’t have a financial incentive to spend more money on this landfill unless the standards that are set are enforced to make it clear that these types of problems are unacceptable,” Cmar said. I would recommend that anyone who is being seriously harmed should contact an attorney.”
But the residents said they are frustrated and don’t know how to get help, even after contacting their local elected officials.
“There’s nothing we can do, no matter who we reach out to; no one will do anything,” said Brittain.
