In my town and the one next to it there are sewage pump buildings that push effluent to the main treatment plant. They always emit a foul odor and, I believe, discharge some kind of grey water in the local waterways. One does for sure. Why does the pump system have to be open to the air releasing that stench? Burping air in the lines? What could be in the water? The ducks hang out in and around it so I assume it isn’t too toxic but its pretty cloudy.
Sewage water might produce quite a bit of flammable gas. You wouldn’t want that trapped.
air will be in the pipes coming to the building along with the sewage, you want to get rid of that to do the pumping.
One of the pipes seems to be leaking the sewerage back to the water way.
or, it might just be surface water (storm water) that is running down past the pumps.
Well surface water is often very dirty, filled with detergents and paints, food and animal excrement/unine, and leakage from vehicles .
What some places do is pump the surface/storm water sytem into the sewerage system normally, but design the system so that if there is a heavy rain storm, the storm water can overflow into the waterway (as the sewerage plant and pumps can’t process all that rain water.)
Odors are kind of hard to deal with; if it’s really bad maybe the residents could persuade the town to build some odor reduction controls, but there’s probably no requirement for the town.
But grey water coming into a waterway from a pump station? There really shouldn’t be any sewage coming from a pump station, and in fact shouldn’t be any discolored water coming from a pump station. Either something is wrong, or the grey color is unrelated to the pump station.
As Isildur said, some places do discharge mixed rainwater and sewage in heavy rains, but a) that shouldn’t be coming from a pump station in general, and b) these places should all be well along the process of eliminating most of those discharges by now anyway.
If it seems like the grey water is really coming out of the pump house, you might give your state environmental agency or the federal EPA a call about it.
MikeF, what did you think a sewage pumping station would smell like?
I would hope that it wouldn’t smell like anything. I don’t smell gas from my fuel pump in my car. But if the system has to be vented to work then I guess it would smell like shit.