Residents of a neighbourhood in Riverview, N.B. say a smell from a nearby brook is so bad it’s keeping them inside, citing what appears to be raw sewage flowing near dozens of homes and one school.
“You look down the brook, this side is all nice and clear, then there’s a second, I don’t know if it’s a sewage line but it looks like a sewer,” says Neighbourhood Watch member Amanda Lynn Crandall. “It’s all murky and you look up in these trees and you can see the waste in the trees.”
Crandall says the smell is especially unbearable on warm days and she believes sewage is the culprit.
“It smells really foul. It’s green. There’s products like toilet paper and feminine hygiene products all throughout the brook, hanging from the trees.”
The brook is on the outer edge of the Claude D. Taylor Elementary School property. Crandall says she remembers the area being a safe place growing up, but she doesn’t feel that way anymore.
“This used to be the spot where kids would come catch tadpoles and we used to go on the path and play in the water. It was never unsafe.”
Residents say they started to smell the foul odour in the fall, just after the town completed work on a road that passes over the brook.
The brook runs behind Shawna Stiles’ home and she says the smell is keeping her from playing with her children in the backyard.
“You open the door and you get a big whiff of sewage,” says Stiles. “When the smell was so bad a couple days ago, I ended up going to the park instead of playing here because it was gross.”
Crandall has made calls to the town, the Department of Health, Environment Canada and the Petitcodiac Riverkeeper, but she says no one has called her back.
CTV News tried to contact the Town of Riverview but our calls were not returned.
With files from CTV Atlantic's Jonathan MacInnis
