Town Complains About Soup Factory Smell
Mon Nov 10, 9:44 AM ET
WOODINVILLE, Wash. - The reek from the StockPot soup factory is back, and so are complaints from neighbors of the Campbell Soup Co. subsidiary.
"I can always tell when it's Tuesday," said Stephen Koplan, who lives about three miles north of the plant. "You can wake up on a Tuesday and the stench will be so bad it's nauseating. It's that B.O. smell.
"If I drive on (Washington) 522, my car will smell like it the rest of the day, and my home, the garage, the whole house. It's just disgusting."
StockPot has paid $18,000 in fines because of the odors, traced mainly to production of onion soup, and installed equipment to spray an odor-reducing enzyme into the exhaust system, officials said. For a time, that seemed to work.
"We even got a few e-mails thanking us, believe it or not," said Jim Nolan, compliance director of the Puget Sound Clean Air Agency.
StockPot president Kathleen Horner blamed weather conditions for the recent complaints.
"We sit in a valley out here," she said. "It's an inversion zone. Cold air can get trapped, and when it warms up you get an 'odor puff.'"
Additional spending doesn't make sense if King County builds a proposed sewage treatment plant on neighboring land, Campbell's officials said. In March the company asked the county to buy out StockPot's lease, which runs through 2012.
"We're not delaying things," Horner said, "but there is the question about how much to invest in this building before we know what King County is going to do."
Nolan said he would meet with company officials soon to discuss the issue.
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