A terrible stench from a coal waste landfill is causing headaches, breathing problems and nausea for some Washington Township residents who said their health and the smell have worsened since the WCPO 9 I-Team first reported on the odor in 2023.
“The second that you start smelling it, you feel like you are going to vomit. Immediately. It is so intense, it just takes over everything. It is awful,” said Rhonda Brittain, who lives across the street from the landfill with her husband, Brian.
The landfill was once a prime farmland in rural Clermont County. In the mid-1980s, then-Cincinnati Gas and Electric Company converted the troubled William H. Zimmer plant on the Ohio River from nuclear power to burn coal. It began buying up family farms a few miles away on the hill, to build a landfill for leftover coal ash with a massive perimeter around it…