Residents on one of the richest estates in Britain are kicking up a stink.

People living at Elvetham Heath in Fleet have been plagued by the smell coming from the sewage works across the M3 motorway for years.

One resident has become so fed up that she has collected 300 signatures on a petition and send it to Thames Water, demanding action.

Aletta Farr said the smell was unbearable, especially in the summer. “It’s just like breathing in from a used toilet,” she said.

“I’ve had to go round plugging up every hole I can find in my house, including the vents in the gas fire, because the smell is so bad.

“The smell reverses back into the system so people have to close their toilet lids to stop it getting even worse.”

Mrs Farr wrote to Thames Water, but was not happy with the reply. She said: “The letter said that apparently there’s a crust that forms on top of the sewage and it’s when it is removed from the site that it smells so awful.

“To try to minimise the impact they are trying to remove this crust during the week, not at the weekend. But I can’t believe this sort of thing is happening in this day and age.

“It’s just such an outdated system. I can’t see why they can’t just put biodegradable enzymes into the sewage to break it up.”

Mrs Farr has only lived at Elvetham Heath for a year but said some residents had been complaining about the stink for years.

She added: “I think that people have become so despondent that they have given up trying to do some-thing about it.

“They seem to think that Thames Water is a big influen-tial company and one person won’t be able to do anything about it.

“But I think it’s like voting — if you don’t do anything about it, then you can’t complain.”

Mrs Farr has collected more than 300 signatures from residents fed up with the stink. She said: “I just went from house to house knocking on the doors and people were saying thank you very much for trying to do something about it.

“I think there is a real health and safety issue here. I heard of a doctor who lived on the estate who was so affected by the bacteria in the air that he had to move.

“We’re talking about raw sewage that is removed, put on a truck and taken away. It makes you wonder where they take it after that?

“I think the problem is that the system has become so overloaded. But this is 2008 — we shouldn’t be scraping crust off raw sewage.”

A Thames Water spokeswoman said: “We are implementing a number of measures at Fleet sewage treatment works to reduce the odour.

“We have completed an odour survey at the site, which identified that the greatest contributor to odour was the process used to convert sludge (the solid waste left behind after treatment) to cake (treated sludge), and the removal of cake from  the  site.

“As a result an engineering scheme is under way to install covered bins, which the cake will be fed into, to reduce the potential of odour. This will be completed at the end of August.”

The spokeswoman said the company had also implemented a number of other measures to try to cut down on the problem.

An odour neutralising chemical will surround the cake as it is being removed and the cake will only be transported off the site during weekdays.
A mobile deodorising mach-ine will target specific sources of odour and all skips will be covered on site.

The amount of sludge in the primary tanks will be reduced and Hart District Council’s environmental health depart-ment and Thames Water’s cus-tomer centre will be warned of any processing issues that may cause a smell.

The spokeswoman added: “We would like to assure resi-dents that we are taking this matter seriously and we will continue to work with local environmental health officers to resolve any issues.”