ONE DENIES Cleveland stinks. It’s the smell of molten steel, the odor of industry keeping the city alive. It sweeps gently up the Cuyahoga from Mittal’s black chimneys, spewing orange flame into our gray skies, wafting between Tower City and Jacobs Field. We take pride in that mill aroma. We’re accustomed to it. But last January, Clevelanders noticed a whole new smell, and this one was not welcome.

A variety of people describe the stench in the records of 99 phone calls to the Cleveland Division of Air Quality (CDAQ), beginning January 11, 2005. One called it a “nauseous odor.” “It smells like chemical waste,” noted another. A Tremont resident described “a very sweet, piney, throw-uppy kind of smell. God-awful.”
It seemed most pungent between the Orange Street Post Office and the Northeast Pre-Release Center on East 30th. Employees at both facilities logged complaints, as did people at MetroHealth, Tri-C, and a middle school on East 40th.
On February 2, an off-duty investigator for the CDAQ followed the smell to a waste-treatment plant on Transport Road. Plumes of vapor rose into the air above tanks used to separate hazardous waste into fuel oil and disposable compounds. The next day, CDAQ conducted an official survey of this business, General Environmental Management. “Upon entering GEM, the odors were overwhelming,” wrote the investigator. “Based on wind direction, where the odors were detected, and consistency of the odors, the cause of the source as determined by the CDAQ, would be GEM.”
The CDAQ first notified GEM of the complaints on February 25. Company President Eric Lofquist promised to conduct an “in-house investigation.” But the smell only got worse.
In March, people started to complain about headaches after repeated exposure to the “GEM smell.” An employee at the Pre-Release Center said she and other staff members suffered “tingling feelings in their hands and tongues” for up to half an hour after breathing in the piney air. Employees at the Lottery Commission office on Superior complained of watery eyes and nausea.
The most recent complaint was phoned in on December 13 by Tri-C psychology professor Marla Colvin. She said the odor made her “lightheaded and dizzy, caused her eyes to burn, and she could taste it,” according to a report logged by the CDAQ. She claimed to have developed asthma only after she began working downwind of GEM.
“Our ventilators can’t handle it,” says Colvin, when reached at her office last week. “It’s coming into the classrooms through cold-air returns. The students are getting ill.”
Colvin thought if she alerted the CDAQ to a business that was making people sick, there would be a quick response. But like the 98 people before her, she’s beginning to realize if she wants anything to change, she’ll have to change it herself. She recently formed a faculty environmental committee and is considering a class-action lawsuit.
What she doesn’t know is that it’s not just the air GEM is affecting. It’s the water, too.

GENERAL ENVIRONMENTAL MANAGEMENT sits at the epicenter of Cleveland history. The factory was built above Norman Rockefeller’s first oil refinery, at the end of a dirty road not far from where the Torso Murderer dispatched his victims. The only view from GEM is of the smokestacks, gangways, and abandoned outposts of Mittal Steel, stretching to the horizon like some H.R. Giger drawing.
Its business is processing industrial waste into usable oil for blast furnaces. According to the Ohio Environmental Protection Agency, GEM processes about 3.3 million gallons of industrial waste a month, producing 600,000 gallons of recycled fuel oil. Two- and-a-half million gallons of pretreated wastewater drain into the local sewer system.
The OEPA does not monitor air quality in the city of Cleveland. That oversight is contracted out to the CDAQ. And so on March 11, 2005, the CDAQ issued the first violation, citing GEM for “odor and public nuisance.”
Lofquist, president of GEM, responded with denial. “I would like to clarify that I never confirmed that GEM was the source of any off-site odor,” he wrote in a letter dated March 22. However, he did submit a corrective plan of action, which included adding a system of fine-mist sprinklers to neutralize odors.
An on-site inspection was conducted by the Cleveland Division of Fire and the CDAQ on April 11. Nobody missed the smell that day. In the report, it’s described as “a strong, sweet, pungent, solvent odor.” Inside the factory, investigators discovered corroded holes in a temporary storage tank that had been used since an explosion destroyed the previous one, according to a report by the fire department. The fire inspector noticed some sort of vapor rising from the holes. There were more holes in exhaust pipes someone had tried to fix with duct tape. Behind the building, black sludge ran down the sides of tanks, collecting into pools. Lieutenant Ollie Zahorodnij issued a violation to GEM and demanded the temporary tank shut down.
According to Capt. Mark Scott, fire inspectors had previously warned GEM of hazardous spills. On January 6, 2005, Scott’s HAZMAT team responded to an explosion on GEM’s property; it was determined that human error had resulted in the ignition of a 50,000-gallon tank of oil and water.
Lofquist maintains the explosion was scheduled and conducted by a demolition team. But the fire inspector’s report states GEM employees repairing a separate tank were the ones to report the fire. GEM was cited for “creating a hazardous condition” and told to shut down “oil side” operations immediately.
The fire department remains unsatisfied. “They are not in total compliance,” says Scott.
The CDAQ returned on October 17 and found more corroded holes, more duct tape, and more black sludge. Again, GEM was asked to fix it. Two weeks later, investigators from the CDAQ returned to find that the holes had been sealed with more duct tape.
After Tri-C professor Colvin called the CDAQ in December, GEM was notified of the complaint. Lofquist explained that his odor-neutralizing misters were frozen. He promised to thaw them “as soon as possible.”

AS LOFQUIST FACED OFF with the CDAQ, his vice president, Scott Forster, handled violations from the Northeast Ohio Regional Sewer District.
Under Ohio law, GEM must notify the sewer district every time it releases a batch of wastewater. The sewer district wants to know what chemicals are in the water and how much GEM is sending, so everything can be processed properly before it reaches Lake Erie. Too much arsenic at the wrong time, for example, and the poison hits the lake untreated.
But GEM consistently dumped batches that exceeded limits for hazardous waste, according to violation reports from the sewer district. For example:
• January 2004: unsafe levels of arsenic
• April 2004: high levels of zinc, chromium, iron, lead, and copper.
• May 2004: too much ammonia.
• April 2005: zinc, fluoride, and iron.
Forster first responded by telling the sewer district’s investigator he must be collecting the water samples incorrectly. “We believe that what was happening was that your sampler was continually picking up stagnant bottom sludge material from the bottom of the discharge manhole,” he writes in a letter dated September 13, 2004.
The sewer district didn’t buy it. “Regardless of the cause, GEM remains responsible for its discharge to the public sewer system,” explained Water Quality Manager Francis Foley, in a February 9, 2005 letter.
“When there’s a downturn in the economy, you get companies cutting corners, tightening their purse strings and making mistakes,” says Larry English, assistant counsel for the sewer district. He doesn’t know if this is the case with GEM, but is monitoring the situation and says legal action is possible.

APPARENTLY, PROLONGED EXPOSURE to toxic air can cause complacency. The CDAQ admits there is a smell, but doesn’t know which chemicals Cleveland residents are being exposed to, and has no plans to find out.
Richard Nemeth, commissioner of air quality for the CDAQ, explains thusly: “Just because things have an irritating odor doesn’t mean they are going to be a risk. Different individuals have different sensitivities to them. Something that smells enjoyable to one person is a nuisance to others.”
Months of fruitless negotiations between the CDAQ and GEM have caused citizens to take action into their own hands.
The chemicals emitted by GEM were sampled on November 29 by Denny Larson of Global Community Monitor of San Francisco and representatives from Ohio Citizen Action. Using an EPA-approved bucket device, the team captured a small amount of air near the GEM facility. This sample was sent to Columbia Analytical Services for testing. Last Friday, the findings were sent to GEM.
The results finally reveal the chemical make-up of the stench Clevelanders have been breathing. These chemicals include, but are not limited to:
• Hydrogen sulfide and ethanol: which, according to the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health, cause headaches, exhaustion, respiratory symptoms, liver damage and reproduction effects.
• Methylene Chloride: causes tingling sensations in limbs, dizziness and nausea.
• 2-butanone: causes headaches and vomiting.
• Xylenes: cause liver and kidney damage (these also have a sweet, piney smell).
• 2-pentanone: causes damage to the central nervous system and can result in coma.
The CDAQ doesn’t even consider GEM’s use of duct tape to fix vapor leaks to be cause for alarm. “If it closes the hole up, that may be adequate at that time,” says Nemeth. “We’re not going to try to tell any facility how to maintain their equipment. We don’t even know if that material was contributing to the nuisance.”
“That is so clearly unacceptable,” says Ward 13 Councilman Joe Cimperman of the quick fix. “Even for the safety of the people that work there. That is really disturbing.”
Cimperman is frustrated that the stench remains an issue after a year of citations and violations. “I’ve driven out to GEM,” he says. “It’s pretty easy to tell where it’s coming from. I don’t know if it’s an unwillingness or an inability to correct it. GEM can’t just say, ‘We can’t do anything about it.’ That’s baloney! I would hope the company would want us to get off their ass.”
Lofquist, however, contends that other businesses in the area contribute to the problem. “It’s absurd to think that all those complaints are coming from [GEM],” he says. GEM’s portion, he says, is produced by a biological treatment system designed to limit pollution.
Though not directly involved in the investigation, the OEPA may finally be stepping into the fray.
“On September 8, a report was sent to Attorney General’s office,” says John Paulian, at the OEPA’s Division of Air Pollution Control. “The company had not done what they were asked to do. There’s talk of filing with the court at some point. Because it’s at the AG’s office, I’m hesitant to say more than that.”
In the meantime, Lofquist says he is working closely with the CDAQ and AG’s office to eliminate the smell once and for all. He’s installed longer ventilation tubes and recalibrated the misting system. “My intention is to fix the odor problem at this facility,” he says. “But these units are not designed to regulate odor, so this is a trial-by-error sort of thing. We are trying new things. We’re working on it.”
Lofquist intends to answer questions posed by the bucket test conducted by Ohio Citizen Action. “I’m very open to that,” he says. “We’re going to work more closely with organizations like this. I’m happy to work with them.”
Until then, the health of those people who have to work near GEM continues to be affected. “Some of our employees have gotten sick,” says Jack Saul, who runs Quality Home Furniture on Woodland Avenue. “I get sick to my stomach. It’s poison. Poison in the air. I’m amazed anybody comes into Cleveland anymore. You can’t breathe.”

jrenner@freetimes.com