Paul Drurie stares into the distance for a moment, trying to come up with the words. “Think of the very worst festival toilet you can think of,” he says, finally. “Completely filled to the brim – and people are still using it, to the point where it is starting to overflow. It’s been sitting there for a day-and-a-half. That will come within the ballpark.”
“All the worst things you can think of, all wrapped into one – with a sort of pickled cabbage,” says local councillor Celeste Donovan.
“It sort of permeates everything. Every molecule, everywhere,” says Vickie Walker, a vintage goods retailer in Bromley, gesturing around her living room. “It’s not a smell,” she says. “It’s a stench.”
For months, residents of east Christchurch have been tortured by this smell. Many call it the Bromley stench: a foul odour that hangs over the suburbs, occasionally extending a tendril into the central city. Local people describe the smell as a malevolent force, relentlessly seeking them out. It makes their skin itch, their heads ache, their eyes water. It seeps under doors, lurks in the roof cavity of houses, works its way in the weave of their clothing. Turning on the car heaters, a blast hits them from the air vents. Turning winds leave sheets stinking on the washing lines. Some days, they swear they can taste it, coating the inside of their mouths.
The source of odours in the area was, initially, a mystery. For years, residents complained of smells that came and went with changing winds. The council struggled to identify a single source – eventually, aided by an app to cross-check smell reports with wind direction, it narrowed down the likely culprit to a large composting plant it runs. Then, at the end of 2021, disaster struck: a fire severely damaged a local plant that processes the city’s sewage. The smell grew steadily worse.
‘Decades of neglect’
On a quiet winter Thursday, the air is still above Bromley. Smoke from wood burners in the city hangs in a thin layer, the air cradled by the surrounding hills. Breathe in and the smell hits: a thick, pungent punch of raw sewage, ribboned with sulphur and the fruity scent of something long dead. It smells like death in a dugout toilet, or 1,000 cabbages liquefying in a dumpster, or the combined force of every mouse that’s perished in a gap between wall and fridge.
A bad smell might sound like a frivolous problem, amid the existential threats of pandemics or climate change or looming recessions. But Bromley residents say the stench is not only a nuisance or unpleasantness: it is an injustice destroying their quality of life.
“We’re basically bearing the brunt of this for the entire city,” says Drurie, an IT worker living in South Brighton. “We have been – I don’t know if the best word is ripped off,” he says. “But [I believe] this is a result of the lack of funding for infrastructure in the East … years and years and decades of neglect.”
Councillor Donovan said while there had been significant investment in the East, it needed more support. “We’re still playing catch up, I think, is the short answer,” she says. “We have to make sure that we have the resources to commit to those communities that might have not had the kind of support and focus that they should have in the past.”
Environmental burdens such as pollution or industrial waste – or smells – tend not to be evenly carried, says Dr Simon Kingham, a professor of human geography at University of Canterbury. Rather, they tend to reflect the wider inequalities of their countries and cities.
“Basically, the poorer you are, the crapper the environment,” Kingham says. The theory is known as environmental justice: the more deprived your neighbourhood is, the more likely you are to be exposed to poor air quality and environmental degradation. Internationally, those findings are often stratified by race. The air you breathe can be segregated along economic and ethnic lines, just like the rest of a city.
“There is an environmental inequity that exists,” says Yani Johanson, councillor for Linwood. The eastern suburbs of Christchurch have some of the city’s higher deprivation rates. The area was also one of the worst hit by the earthquakes that devastated the city in 2010 and 2011, and the recovery is ongoing.
Johanson says that while the wastewater treatment plant is “a crisis”, the smell problems didn’t begin there – they began with the compost plant, which over the years has been subject to thousands of complaints.
“Why does it seem OK that things that have adverse environmental impacts end up in lower socio-economic areas, and seem to be seen as acceptable and tolerated?” he asks.
“There’s a bit of a chicken and egg,” Kingham says: expensive houses are often in greener, cleaner, less-polluted areas. But he says it’s also easier for industry to create bad environments in lower income areas, and harder for deprived communities to demand clean-ups when things go wrong. “That’s because they don’t necessarily have the social capital to be able to stop them happening,” he says. “If you have lawyers, and people with wealth, and planners in your community, they will know how to fight those sorts of developments.”
Helen Beaumont, the head of Three Waters at Christchurch city council, which manages the plant, says after the fire, council acted immediately to try to mitigate the odour – and would have done the same in any area of the city. The work to fix the problem is technically complex, and has already cost millions.
“I don’t think there’s anything we could have done that would have been faster or more efficient and effective,” she said. “Certainly, it makes absolutely no difference where the plant is located. None at all.”
But even seven months in, no one can give a final timeline for when the smell will stop – or if it will ever be eliminated entirely. While work is under way on the problem, Beaumont expects the smell will be “intermittent” in the future. So far, the council has offered a one-off compensation payment of $200 to help residents with the cost of drying laundry or installing air purifiers.
For many local people, it’s small comfort. They say the smell makes their properties unsellable, leaving them trapped in the stench. Sometimes, Walker says, it makes her feel as if she is going a bit mad. “We get woken up in the night, by the smell of the sewerage. Can you imagine what that’s like?” she says. “You can’t breathe. I get this fight or flight [response] … Like: oh, my god, how am I gonna get rid of it? We can’t leave our home, we’re stuck, we’re trapped.”
