An off-putting smell being reported by neighbors who live near the Orange County landfill is a costly problem for county leaders.
Complaints are coming in as far as 5 miles away from the landfill, which is located off Young Pine Road near State Road 417.
A community meeting was held at the Orange County Solid Waste Division Building on Curry Ford Road Wednesday night, where county leaders explained what they are doing to clear the air.
They said they have hired consultants and they’re already spending hundreds of thousands of dollars to fix the problem.
However, county leaders admitted it’s going to take more time to keep the smell from seeping out of the Orange County landfill.
“I have no plans on moving, I mean this is my house. This is my home. It’s my first home," said neighbor Justin Ward, who has lived in his home in the Waterside Estates since 2012.
Ward's home is less than two miles away from the Orange County landfill.
However, over the past year, he’s been greeted by an unpleasant smell, especially after it rains at night or in the morning.
“This morning for example it was really bad. I smelled it as soon as I got up and inside my house, I wasn’t even outside,” Ward said. “But there’s other days, it’s kinda like when you have a messy car and you smell stuff in your car, after a while you kinda get a little bit used to it but you can still smell it."
County leaders told community members on Wednesday that the "rotten egg" smell is actually hydrogen sulfide, something that’s produced from mixing construction and demolition materials with trash at the landfill.
Now consultants are helping them remedy the issue, with simple but costly recommendations.
“We have made a lot of progress in doing kind of a double; cover the landfill with dirt to try to keep those odors down and under control. We’ve seen a bit of reduction of the odors coming out of the hill itself but people are still smelling it, so we have more work to do," said Orange County Solid Waste manager Jim Becker.
Even in a neighborhood where homes are worth more than $200,000, some residents don’t feel comfortable inviting their friends over for backyard cookouts and are now second guessing their real estate investments.
“It’s a problem that I didn’t really identify at the beginning when I first moved here and now it’s gotten to a point where it’s bad and then if it keeps going, it’s going to get worse and what do we do, what does the county do, how do we solve the problem?" Ward said.
However, Becker is confident that by covering that part of the landfill where the smell is coming from with 2.5 times more dirt, an odor neutralizer, and eventually capping and closing off that site, will get the smell under control and complaints back to zero.
“I do feel this is our highest priority at the moment to get this odor controlled and not be a problem for our neighbors," Becker said.
County leaders said they hope to have their odor control plan finalized by January.
Meanwhile, county leaders want anyone who can smell the Orange County landfill in their neighborhood to file a complaint location, time and date on the Solid Waste Hotline at 407-836-6601 or email their complaint to Solid.Waste@ocfl.net.