Ga. Town’s Residents: Property Values Threatened by Waste Plant Odor

The town of Talmo, Ga., boasts a post office, a volunteer fire department, a few cattle farms, two Coke machines and 500 residents who grew up “on beans and cornbread,” locals like to say.

But they have been holding their noses because of a newcomer.

“When buzzards fly over, even they gag,” said lifelong resident Don Sorrels, who like many others in the town has smelled all he can stand of the odor from the Agri-Cycle plant.

The private wastewater treatment facility that opened up a few years ago recycles poultry byproducts and waste and uses a land-application treatment system to dispose of it on company property.

Offended residents claim the smell – which they describe in scarcely printable terms – is causing land values to drop, neighbors to move and the quality of life to plummet.

The residents of Talmo, a speck of a town splayed out against a railroad line about 60 miles northeast of Atlanta, have been holding hearings and begging public officials to snuff out the plant for good since 2005.

Jackson County commissioners heard their pleas and filed a lawsuit – still pending – that claims the plant is misusing a zoning permit.

The Georgia Environmental Protection Division took action, too. The agency won temporary closure of the plant a few weeks ago and was back in court Tuesday in nearby Jefferson arguing that it should be shut down permanently.

The state argues that the plant repeatedly dumps untreated waste into a nearby creek, has expanded without a permit, and overloaded fields and lagoons used to break down restaurant grease and poultry waste.

“You have, on balance, a facility that’s not in compliance,” Carol Couch, the division’s director, testified Tuesday. “We’ve done everything we could to get the site performing according to permit.”

The plant’s lawyers contend they need more time to install new filters and other technology that could cut down on the odor. They said more recent tests have shown the plant has had minimal impact on the creek, and point to internal reports that could prove the plant has cleaned up some groundwater pollutants.

They also argue that Talmo’s rural nature, dotted with chicken coups and other odor-generating operations, means that Agri-Cycle can’t be held entirely responsible for the foul smell.

“We know we’re unpopular,” one of the plant’s attorneys told the judge. “We just hope you look at all the facts.”

Officials said a decision on the plant’s fate could be handed down soon after Tuesday’s hearing.

But many in town still worry. They say the only thing to kill the smell so far was a fire that broke out last month when a pump in a 5-acre pond shorted out, burning up the greasy waste.

“We’re not mad about business over there,” said Jill Miller, who owns a cattle ranch across the street from the plant. “But what they’re doing to our land, our air quality and our water quality is bad.”

So bad, said Billy Crawford, that it forced him to move in July to escape the stench.

“You can’t live like that,” said Crawford, a carpenter who has lived in Talmo for 11 years. “You might as well be in prison if you’re going to be cooped up in the house all day.”

The odor is gone for now. A sniff of the air Tuesday in downtown Talmo revealed no remarkable smells, other than the fragrance of fresh grass clippings that trailed a city worker mowing a lawn.

Sorrels, for one, wants it to stay that way. He said he never again wants the stench to seep through his car windows when he’s driving home from church, never wants to have to run from his driveway into the house in fear of taking in a whiff.

“I live next door to a chicken plant. I’ve worked in a poultry plant,” he said. “But I’ve never smelled anything as bad as this.

“It’s the awfullest smell in my whole life.”

Topics Georgia Property