On the back porch of her West Davisville home, Linda Knutton has learned to check the wind before deciding whether to eat dinner outside.
"There have been times when we have chosen not to sit on our back porch, when we've chosen not to eat outdoors," Knutton told WPRI in June, describing how the severity of the smell shifts with which way the air is moving. Another neighbor, Sharon Daniels, told the outlet she has woken up night after night to a strong asphalt-and-rotten-egg smell drifting through her windows.
Now, Rhode Islanders have a new, formal channel to report smells like these to the state. At the direction of Governor Dan McKee, the Rhode Island Department of Environmental Management has created an odor-reporting form for residents statewide, according to a civic alert posted by the Town of North Kingstown on July 6. The form asks people to log the time, location and details of industrial odors coming from facilities, landfills, wastewater treatment plants or environmental cleanup sites — information DEM says will help it spot patterns, evaluate air quality concerns and decide where to focus monitoring and enforcement.
The alert makes clear the tool wasn't built in a vacuum. It explicitly says the form will be "especially helpful" for West Davisville residents who have spent months complaining about asphalt odors they link to industrial activity nearby — a dispute that has drawn statewide attention and, now, a direct response from the governor's office.
A neighborhood under pressure
The complaints in West Davisville have centered on Bitumar Inc., which operates a facility on Compass Circle that transfers liquid asphalt from rail cars to trucks, inside the Quonset Business Park. DEM has received roughly 128 complaints tied to Bitumar since March 26, according to a DEM spokesperson, and the agency has conducted nine inspections and source checks in response.
But DEM has stopped short of pinning the smell on any single source. "While the investigation remains ongoing, OC&I has not, to date, identified any violations of applicable odor regulations," a DEM statement said, referring to the agency's Office of Compliance and Inspection. The statement added that the absence of a violation "does not indicate the absence of odors" — rather, that whatever odors have been detected haven't met the legal threshold that would trigger enforcement. DEM said documentation from its inspections won't be released until the investigation wraps up.
Bitumar, through attorney Jennifer Cervenka, has pointed to other possible sources inside the same industrial park, including a nearby hot-mix asphalt plant and what she described as significant paving work underway by the Rhode Island Department of Transportation. Cervenka said DEM has not cited Bitumar for any odor-related violations, and that the company has already made operational changes aimed at cutting down on smells while it continues investigating the complaints. The Quonset Development Corporation, which manages the business park and leased Bitumar the site, said it has "consistently urged DEM, the regulator in these matters, to make addressing the situation a priority based on science and evidence."
Town officials, for their part, have grown openly frustrated with the pace of the state's response. North Kingstown Councilman Matt McCoy has said residents who file complaints get "a perfunctory email from DEM that says, 'Thank you very much...'" — a complaint pointed enough that it reached the governor directly. McKee, appearing at a recent Town Council meeting for an unrelated matter, was pressed on the issue and told the council, "We'll follow through again with the DEM and follow up on that." The new odor form appears to be the tangible result of that promise.
What the form does — and doesn't — change
DEM has long accepted odor complaints through its Office of Compliance and Inspection, whose Air Pollution Program investigates reports of visible emissions, odors, fugitive dust and similar nuisances under existing state regulation. That rule, 250-RICR-120-05-17, already prohibits emitting "any air contaminant or combination of air contaminants which creates an objectionable odor." What isn't yet clear is how much the new form changes in practice — whether it's a genuinely new statewide system for tracking and analyzing odor patterns, or a more visible, centralized front door to a complaint process that already existed.
West Davisville's dispute is unfolding alongside — but is legally distinct from — a separate, higher-stakes fight over a proposed sludge-processing facility at Quonset, which has drawn a lawsuit from residents and a federal notice of intent to sue over air permitting. The two controversies share a zip code and, at times, the same worried neighbors, even though they involve different companies and different legal questions.
DEM Director Terry Gray has said separately, in connection with odor complaints along Providence's Allens Avenue, that the agency is updating its odor regulations and its rules for asphalt plants, changes he said "will help us solve this problem quicker" and could eventually include a nuisance standard aimed at quality-of-life complaints from residents living near industrial sites. Whether those changes arrive in time to satisfy West Davisville's residents — or whether the new reporting form itself proves to be more than a data-collection exercise — is likely to be tested in the months ahead.