A PUTRID BURNING odour wafted across Waterford city this week, leading to people to avoid the city centre and some shops to briefly close their doors.

It came after a cooker unit at a meat rendering plant malfunctioned at the Waterford Proteins factory, run by the ABP Food Group.

The smell – described by one local councillor as “sickening” – spread as far as 5 kilometres away.

The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) said an “issue was identified” with the cooker unit at the factory on Sunday, requiring a temporary shutdown to carry out maintenance.

ABP Proteins Waterford formally notified the EPA that same day. The regulator said that it received “several complaints regarding odour in Waterford city” the following day, on Monday.

One of these came from Waterford City and County Council, which contacted the EPA following numerous complaints by locals.

A spokesperson for Waterford Proteins said in a short statement that the issue was “fully resolved”.

“Over the weekend, a temporary operational matter occurred due to a mechanical issue. An incident report was submitted to the EPA. The issue has been fully resolved,” the company’s spokesperson said.

Local councillor Donal Barry’s phone was “blowing up” throughout Monday as a result of what he described as a “horrendous” smell.

“I started receiving calls concerning the smell around the city from various people basically enquiring as to what was causing the obnoxious smell,” Barry told The Journal.

The odour spread from the factory’s site in Christendom, Ferrybank, across the Suir, reaching into the heart of the city in the Apple Market. It stretched further into housing estates in the west of the city.

“It was not a good smell for people to be dealing with, especially at the height of the tourist season,” Barry said.

A spokesperson for the EPA said that it carried out an odour impact assessment and a site inspection on Monday, where it found that repairs to the cooker had been completed and the unit was operational at the time of the inspection.

“The cooker is currently functioning as expected and no further odour issues are anticipated in relation to this incident,” the EPA spokesperson said.

The EPA’s recently published annual environmental report into the site recorded that four complaints were made regarding odour from the plant last year, one of which was reported to have lasted for four hours. Each complaint had been addressed by the factory according to the EPA report.

The factory has faced strong opposition in the past, particularly when it sought to expand its meat rendering capacity to 600 tonnes of meat per day – a 60% increase compared to its previous operation. This was granted two years ago.