Fixing a Sewage Odor from a Missing Roof Vent in El Paso County

Sandy Sanchez and her husband bought their first home in a rural stretch of El Paso County, Texas, early in the summer of 2026, ready to start over outside the city.

They picked the property on purpose. Their daughter is allergic to a wide range of outdoor allergens, including grass, weeds, trees and dust stirred up by vegetation. A lot with mostly bare dirt and no grass meant fewer triggers.

“That’s the main reason why we moved out here,” Sanchez said.

Excitement Turns to Worry

The excitement of buying a home did not last the week.

“We were very excited to get the house at the beginning,” Sanchez said. “Then, during our first week moving in, it became very hectic. It was like, ‘What did we get ourselves into with this house?'”

It had been a fast sale. Sanchez and her husband were first-time homebuyers with no experience buying property, let alone knowing about a septic system. A home inspection was completed before the sale, and nothing in the report pointed to the plumbing vent issue they would later discover.

A Smell That Kept Coming Back

Once the Sanchez family started unpacking boxes and settling into the home over the first few weeks, a sewage-like smell began showing up every day.

“The first thing I noticed was this funky smell,” Sanchez said. “It would always happen around noon.”

Sanchez had the septic tank pumped. She called in a plumber for other repairs around the house, but the smell kept coming back. The odor persisted, and so did the sickness moving through her family. She and her husband have three kids.

“If one kid got sick, eventually all five of us would get sick,” Sanchez said.

Some afternoons the smell and the heat together were too much, and the family would leave the house until it passed.

Doctor visits for the kids turned up nothing that explained what was happening. Eventually, Sanchez would learn the source was connected to the home’s plumbing system and an issue that had gone unnoticed.

Finding Communities Unlimited

In mid-June, Sanchez saw that a local community center was hosting an event on septic systems. She told her husband they should go.

That is where Sanchez connected with Rebecca Manriquez-Fuentes, an Infrastructure Consultant with Communities Unlimited (CU). On July 7, Manriquez-Fuentes joined West Texas Coordinator Andres Villarreal, Central Texas Coordinator Kayley Poston and Senior Consultant Britton Howe for a site visit at the Sanchez home.

Tracing the Real Source: A Missing Roof Vent

CU checked the septic tank and leach field first. Both were working the way they were supposed to. Howe then looked at the roof and noticed there were no visible vent pipes. That shifted the attention away from the septic system Sanchez had already paid to pump and toward the home’s plumbing ventilation.

Manriquez-Fuentes gave Sanchez a list of local plumbers. One of them installed a ventilation pipe in the laundry room, the room where the smell hit hardest. The vent gave sewer gases a way to escape outside while helping balance pressure in the plumbing system, rather than allowing the odor to build up inside the home. Once the source was identified, addressing it took a single plumber visit.

Relief That Held

Four days later, Sanchez confirmed the smell had not come back, and her kids weren’t getting sick anymore.

Manriquez-Fuentes checked in with Sanchez several more times over the following weeks to make sure the repair held and the odor had not returned.

The project was funded through a U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) wastewater treatment works program that supports decentralized and onsite septic systems. It is one piece of CU’s water and wastewater systems work across Arkansas, Alabama, Louisiana, Mississippi, Oklahoma, Tennessee and Texas, where staff connect rural homeowners with plumbers, engineers and technical know-how to keep water and wastewater systems running on their own land.

“It’s been a blessing, honestly,” Sanchez said. “In my head, I thought this was going to be a huge problem. Thankfully, it wasn’t. I appreciated that CU was willing to listen, understand our situation and work with us to find a solution.”