Bay Area Regulators Settle With Wastewater Plant for $734,000 Over Foul Odor

San Francisco Bay water quality regulators announced Wednesday a $734,000 settlement with C&H Sugar, three years after the company’s Crockett wastewater plant sent out an extreme smell for more than a month following an equipment failure.

This comes a month after the same company settled with Contra Costa County prosecutors for approximately $500,000 over the same incident.

The equipment failure occurred due to excessive heat in September 2022. Residents living near the plant complained that it made them sick and “reported smelling rotten eggs and suffered subsequent nausea, burning eyes, headaches, and respiratory problems during this entire period. Some residents reported avoiding walking and recreating outside,” Crockett Community Services District said in a statement on Wednesday.

“C&H, which was operating the plant, did not have a sufficient contingency plan in place to deal with kinds of exceedingly warm weather that they got that day and that we see more and more of with climate change,” said Bill Johnson, a San Francisco Bay Regional Water Quality Control board member.

The company also discharged wastewater that failed to meet the agency’s water quality standards.

The Water Board said that it required C&H to share information about the reliability of its treatment system, specifically about the causes of the equipment failures that resulted in the odor.

They said that C&H responded 209 days past the deadline and failed to include significant elements in their report, like what would be done to properly maintain the equipment and prevent power outages.

C&H owns and operates the majority of the Crockett plant, but shares part of it with the Crockett Community Services District.

“C&H is committed to responsible operations and has invested in significant upgrades to the jointly-owned water treatment facility that processes wastewater from the local community and the sugar factory,” they said in a statement.

The Water Board asked that $360,000 of the settlement money go to its Cleanup and Abatement Account, which awards grants for pollution cleanup projects in California. It plans to spend the remaining $374,000 on projects to improve the Carquinez Waterfront.

On Oct. 3, the board published the settlement for a 30-day public comment period.

“If none of the comments suggest that we need to change the settlement in some important way, we’ll send the settlement to our executive officer to approve or disapprove on behalf of the board,” Johnson said.