In Gloucester City, residents are fuming over fumes

A southwest wind visits Gloucester City most summer days, coming in long fetches up the Delaware River or straight across from Philadelphia.

It can loft kites, flutter flags, and lay some welcome cool onto the city's waterfront Proprietors' Park. But sometimes it sends an "uh-oh" through the south side of town.

That's when the breeze picks up petroleum odors from the Blueknight Energy Partners asphalt plant on Water Street, home to eight million barrels of asphalt.

"Oh, it's horrible," said Denise Becker, whose family moved into a house across the street one year ago. "Sometimes we have to close the windows just so we can breathe."

As she stood in the doorway of her two-story rowhouse last Monday, a faint but distinct odor of asphalt appeared, vanished, and reappeared every few seconds. But it was "nothing" on this particular day, Becker said. Sometimes, it's "10 times" worse.

"It's all year round, though mostly spring and summertime," said Becker, who, with her husband, Milbert Navarro, has five children ages 2 to 13. "And my daughter has severe allergies and asthma, so I often wonder: 'What else are we breathing in?'."

Bob Kotter, who lives in the 400 block of Market Street, four blocks from the plant - and whose "hands are full with sick parents" - said he, too, wonders what's in that smell.

"Sometimes the fumes burn your eyes," said Kotter, 69. A lifelong resident, he said and his elderly parents have been "putting up with it for years" but "nobody does anything about it" despite his complaints to environmental agencies.

Reactions vary around town, however. In the 700 block of Jersey Avenue, six blocks away, it's a nonissue for longtime resident Tom Rouh. "We don't smell nothing," he said.

But close by, in the 200 block of Orange Street, "it's pretty pungent most days," said Ryan Durham, 35, who moved in three years ago.

"A large part of the summer my house is totally sealed up. I can't open the doors or my eyes are burning and my throat is burning. So you definitely feel the effects coming off of that plant," Durham said.

State and federal environmental agencies said they have received occasional complaints about the smells coming from Blueknight but never found they violated air-quality standards.

Blueknight declined a request from the Inquirer to tour the facility, which sits behind a long brick wall fronting several blocks of Water Street. The operation includes a pier on the Delaware for cargo vessels, five large storage tanks, and several metal canopies where tank trucks load for deliveries.

The plant referred all questions to the company's corporate headquarters in Oklahoma City.

A spokesman there said the plant had recently received a permit from the New Jersey Department of Environmental Protection to install equipment designed to abate the smell. Some of that equipment is in place, he said, and more would be added by year's end.

The spokesman, Brent Gooden, said that in response to complaints the plant was also directing its trucks to avoid the most heavily populated parts of Gloucester as they travel through it.

Despite the visceral responses of some residents to the smells, the perceptions of others varied greatly.

"There's an asphalt plant in town?" said a man smoking a cigarette Wednesday in 600 block of Market Street. "It don't bother me."

"I don't smell it here," said another man talking to two women on the steps of a rowhouse in the 300 block of Market Street.

He said he was no stranger to petroleum smells, having worked at the former Sunoco Eagle Point refinery in West Deptford and the Citgo asphalt refinery in Paulsboro. His companions said they, too, did not detect smells from the plant.

But Joseph Domanick, manager of the Family Market in the 200 block of Market Street, said "you can smell it by Broadway," which runs north-south through Gloucester. "One time I thought something was burning in my car."

Several residents questioned whether the smells from Blueknight, if they persist, would reach the large middle school under construction in the 500 block of Market Street. It is due to open next year.

Among them was Bill Cleary, former editor of the Gloucester City News. He said that the smell doesn't reach his home on the east side of town, but that on a recent pass through the west side "my eyes watered and burned and my throat got sore. It was like I was hit with tear gas."

"I feel sorry for those living on the west side of Gloucester City," Cleary, who now writes a news blog about the community, said in an email. "The city fathers seem to have forgotten them."

Not so, said city administrator Jack Lipsett. "In my eight years" as administrator "I've only had two complaints" about the smell.

The federal Environmental Protection Agency and the U.S. Occupational Safety and Health Administration each said it had no complaints about air quality at the plant and had never visited it.

Larry Hajna, spokesman for the New Jersey Department of Environmental Protection, said that the state has regulations governing odors and that it got three complaints about Blueknight last year and three so far this year.

But by the time inspectors from the department's air-quality division arrive on the scene, he said, "the problem has disappeared" and the inspectors have issued no citations or warnings to the plant.

A fact sheet prepared by the department and available on its website says inspectors do not necessarily use monitoring equipment to determine if odors are in violation of air-quality standards.

Rather, investigators use a sniff test on a scale of zero ("not detectable") to five ("overpowering and intolerable") to judge whether an odor "unreasonably interfere(s) with the enjoyment of life or property."

Frequency, duration, and pervasiveness of an offensive odor are also factors in determining whether the state issues a citation, according to the document.

First offenses may warrant fines between $150 and $1,400. Continuing violations are subject to fines of up to $15,000 for each incident.

doreilly@phillynews.com

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