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Soon you won't have to sniff at Oldsmar

That fishy odor should disappear when a sewer pipe project is complete along Buckingham Avenue.

By NICOLE JOHNSON
Published March 22, 2005

OLDSMAR - Downtown Oldsmar should soon smell a lot better.

No, the city isn't going to plant a gazillion rose bushes.

A mega sewer pipe project along Buckingham Avenue, almost complete, promises to cut down on odors that downtown residents have long complained about.

Sometimes the smells would come early in the morning. Other times the whiff would hit you when you got home from work.

"Sometimes, when the wind blew from the east you'd smell it," said said Gary McLaughlin, 58, a bus driver trainer for Pinellas County Schools, who lives at the corner of Lee Street and Dartmouth Avenue. "It's a pretty fishy odor."

The odor was methane gas seeping up from a heavily used sewage pipe running beneath Buckingham Avenue, said city public works director John Mulvihill.

More than half of the city's sewage runs through the pipe below Buckingham Avenue on its way to the nearby water treatment plant on Lafayette Avenue.

The facility treats about 1.8-million gallons of sewage a day. About 900,000 of that comes through the Buckingham Avenue route, from as far away as Forest Lakes and East Lake Woodlands.

By the time the sewage reaches Buckingham Avenue, some of it has been sitting for 18 hours in underground holding tanks around the city, Mulvihill said.

The age and quantity of sewage flowing through the pipes created a situation where gas often would seep back up through the plumbing into people's homes and escape through roof vents, causing the neighborhood to stink.

"Because of the retention time, it's digesting in the system and causing it to smell," Mulvihill said.

The goal was to reduce the amount of sewage flowing through the Buckingham Avenue gravity system, Mulvihill said.

Progress on the sewage project is evident during a drive down Buckingham Avenue. Large white pipes are piled on the side of the excavated road.

Once complete, more than 2,000 feet of 16-inch diameter piping will be laid from Park Avenue to Lafayette Boulevard, eliminating the Buckingham Avenue pit stop for thousands of gallons of sewage.

The city awarded the $358,000 project to Oldsmar-based Keystone Excavators Inc. in February. Work should be done in April.

"Our No. 1 goal is to make the smell go away," Mulvihill said. "We've spent a long time trying to come up with a design that would work."

--Nicole Johnson can be reached at njohnson@sptimes.com or 727 771-4303.

[Last modified March 22, 2005, 01:21:16]