INDIANAPOLIS STINKS, LITERALLY!

I'm a big fan of Indianapolis. America's 12th largest city, Indy is the perfect mix of mid-city sophistication served up with a side of genuine midwestern hospitality. With its arts, sports, culture, culinary delights, history and heritage, Indianapolis truly is the best-kept secret of the heartland!

That being said, someone needs to do something about the smell of raw sewage that permeates our air. It's particularly strong on hot and humid days (but not exclusively), and can be found by rolling a window down while driving along Fall Creek Parkway (between Meridian and 38th Street), as well as up around Broad Ripple Park (near Evanston Avenue and 65th), and downtown between Pennsylvania and Meridian on Washington and Maryland streets.

Has anyone else experienced this or am I the only one?

Sorry, Mikal, but it's been this way as long as I can remember. My siblings' and my own excitement about going into the "big city" to shop for school clothes was always tempered by dread of the stench of Indy. And now my kids can also recognize where we are by the smell when we get close to downtown.

You can also smell it on the South Side coming up Bluff Road right by the White River.

Ugh. Try working downtown. Nothing worse than a walk thru the sewers on the way to lunch.

When I first moved here, I had a weird romance with the smell of downtown some days. I thought it smelled like starch. The first time I mentioned it, I was told that the smell was from a rendering plant near downtown.
Rendering plant = Dog food = Road kill
Think it's true?

Part of the stench is soybeans which are roasted at General Starch. Another ingredient of the stench is the hideous-smelling steam that pours out of every sewer opening in downtown Indianapolis. This steam is generated from trash being boiled at the city's southside incineration plant. The steam is used to heat buildings. The city's wastewater plants overflow during heavy rains, making the White River into an open latrine. And, some people claim the stench is due to the local job market.

Then there's the smell of horse feces along Market Street and the stench as you walk right next to the Dome. And let's not forget the awful smell while driving down 96th street towards Allisonville Road on any given morning; that's from the Carmel sewage treatment plant right on the White River nearby. This is one nasty bleep-hole of a city. Seriously.

In Indianapolis, more than 1 billion gallons of untreated sewage are discharged into the environment each year because treatment plants cannot handle the flow during wet weather.

http://www.nrdc.org/water/pollution/sewage.asp

The runoff goes into the white river, that's where the smell comes from. It's happening because for the 20 years we have let new housing developers build and connect to an antiquated sewer system that should have been rebuilt back in the 1980s, when Lugar and then Goldsmith were mayors.

Read this PDF file for detailed information on the problem.

http://www.nrdc.org/water/pollution/sewage/sewage.pdf

Smell it or leave it