Monty Nelson has lived with the sickening stench for nine years.

A foul odour of rotting sewage constantly wafts out of manholes near his home in Ermineskin, in south Edmonton.

The smells have been emanating from the city sanitary lines for years, and previous attempts to stifle the stench have been unsuccessful.

The city has installed one-way flaps on the lines, sealed manhole openings, and flushed the lines in recent years, but nothing worked.

Residents say the smell is particularly bad at the corner of 111th Street and 29A Avenue, where a 90-degree bend in the pipe pushes the powerful stench above ground.

"It's not good," said Nelson, vice-president of the Ermineskin community league.

"If anyone has driven through the area, even if you're just stopped at the red light, it can start to smell quite bad, whether it's sort of a rotten egg smell or a sewer smell. It's certainly quite noticeable."

Ermineskin is just the latest Edmonton neighbourhood to complain about sewage smells, as old drainage lines become taxed beyond their capacity.

The stench got so bad in West Jasper Place during sewer line construction last year that some residents suffered extreme headaches and nausea. The city was flooded with complaints and Alberta Health Services was called in to investigate.

Chris Ward, manager of utility services for the city of Edmonton, says sewer concerns are a growing problem, but a solution to the smells can be hard to find.

He says the stench in Ermineskin is still under investigation.

"The difficulty with odour is that every single location is a completely different problem and a completely different mitigating factor is needed to address the problem," Ward said.

"We are developing odour control strategies to say, what can we do about all of these locations and what is the problem that needs to be addressed."

Although the city preparing to build storm relief systems in the area to address flooding concerns, Ward says ridding the area of hydrogen sulphide gases that are causing the stench will be more complicated.

The city is proposing a series of upgrades in the area, including a redesign of the "drop shaft" which runs under the intersection at 111th Street and 29A Avenue, and retrofitting the Duggan pump station.

Image | Stinky corner

Caption: The city says a badly designed pipe is pushing stinky sewer gases above ground on this corner in south Edmonton. (Google Images)

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Increased treating of the sewage will be done in some strategic locations, including pump stations at Blue Quill, Twin Brooks and Blackburne, and adding new vent stacks to ease pressure along the lines.

However, the city's planning department says the bulk of the infrastructure upgrades won't begin until 2019.

In the meantime, lines which stretch from Ermineskin to Bonnie Doon will be inspected and scrubbed of built-up sediment and organic materials, and air-quality testing will continue.

And so residents will have to hold their noses a little longer.

Although wary of what happened in West Jasper Place, Nelson says his neighbours are hopeful the upcoming construction won't make matters worse.

"We are aware of what's happened out in west Edmonton," Nelson said.

"And we're aware that once you get down into an underground project that things aren't always as they seem or perhaps they're even worse than than they seem.

"We're certainly hoping that they can address it."