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Mary Kathryn Lamonge has two options for dealing with the thick stench wafting into her home from the nearby Roger Road Wastewater Treatment Plant.

She can turn off her swamp cooler, close her windows and swelter in an unbearably hot house. Or she can wrap a blanket around her head.

"The only way I could breathe is to cover my nose," Lamonge said.

Suffering through those smelly nights is something Lamonge has come to share with more and more Tucsonans lately — and not all of them, by a long shot, are smelling the infamous Roger Road plant.

An Arizona Daily Star analysis of odor complaints over the last three years shows a doubling each year since 2004.

No longer limited to a 2-mile circle around the Roger Road plant, the range of complaints now reaches down to Barrio Viejo south of Downtown, north to near La Encantada shopping center in the Catalina Foothills, and as far east as East Grant Road and North Alvernon Way.

Pima County Wastewater Management officials attribute much of the increase to more public awareness about how to make an odor complaint. But they acknowledge the smells from Roger Road have been more noxious in the last year.

And sewer lines themselves are provoking more complaints.

Sometimes David Colburn can hardly stand the smell that comes from the sewer line running by his house at Roger Road and Park Avenue.

"If you stop over the manhole cover and you've got your vent on in your car, it'll gag you," he said.

And Isola Jacobs has had visitors actually get up and leave her home in Downtown's Barrio Viejo, the smell was so bad.

Wastewater officials say this should be the last year residents have to tolerate these odors, and we should see a considerable improvement by July.

The county has spent $4.5 million over 20 separate projects — and another $400,000 on consultants — to control odors in the sewer system.

The projects include covering certain areas of the Roger Road plant where churning sewage releases odors into the air, a reverse airflow system to channel gas from the biotowers through organic filters and chemical dosing units that will release precise amounts of chlorine into sewer lines.

Wastewater Deputy Director Mike Bunch said it's the first time the county has taken a "holistic" approach to the odor problem. When the projects are done, there should be no odor beyond the property lines of the Roger Road plant, and automatic monitoring systems throughout the sewer lines will tell workers when to release more chlorine before the complaints start rolling in.

The Roger Road treatment plant, 2600 W. Sweetwater Drive, handles sewage for roughly 200 square miles of Tucson, including the most densely populated parts of the region. The wind that blows off the plant is full of a thick, unpleasant stench that fills the nostrils and lungs.

Lamonge lives less than a mile away from the plant. She expected some odors, but not so strong or so frequent.

Diane Newman has lived a mile and a half east of the plant for 17 years and says the stench is an "increasingly ongoing problem."

"It has progressively gotten worse over the years, and in the past year the odor has increased tremendously," Newman said. "And the number of times has increased tremendously."

Barbara Fulton has lived 2 1/2 miles west of the plant for 20 years. The smell wasn't bad enough to prompt a complaint until last January.

"It seems to have grown out to here, and that is the reason I had called to begin with," she said. She wanted the department to know: "Are you aware it is getting farther away?"

Wastewater Management spokeswoman Laura Fairbanks said there are other reasons for the growing complaint log.

"It's not to say that these other places didn't stink in 2004 and 2005. It's just that people didn't know where to call," she said.

But Fairbanks, who lives a half a mile away from the Roger Road plant, said this fall was the worst it had ever been since she moved to her home in 1999.

"I came in every day and I told the engineers, 'It smelled worse this year than any year. It was really, really bad last night.' "

Growth has contributed to the odor problems, but not in the ways you might think.

It's not a matter of sewage overloads, but of distance and growth patterns that undermined previous attempts to get the problem under control.

The department expanded the Ina Road treatment plant, expecting the Northwest area to grow. But the Sonoran Desert Conservation Plan limited growth in the Northwest and shifted it to the Southeast and Southwest.

The sewage from the new homes was flowing into the Roger Road plant, and the longer sewage travels the smellier it gets. It can take as long as 24 hours for the contents of a toilet flushed in Vail to reach the plant.

"We couldn't keep up with the faraway flows that were being added," Fairbanks said.

Those changes created ripple effects throughout the system.

"What starts over here in one neighborhood on the far East Side is going to impact odors down here which is going to impact odors here, which is going to make things worse at the plant," Fairbanks said. "It is like the knee bone is connected to the leg bone kind of thing."

Odor-control projects that should be finished by December are the short-term solution. The long-term solution is to build a new, modern plant at Roger Road and tear down the old plant. That plan is part of the county's $500 million effort to comply with state and federal regulations, and will include an expansion at the Ina Road plant.

The county also may install more chemical dosing units to "perfume" what's flowing through the lines, as well as stations to allow the release of gases building up in the lines. Those stations would also include reverse air-flow systems similar to that being built at Roger Road.

A similar system is being installed in Orange County, Calif.

Carla Dillon, engineering supervisor for the Orange County Sanitation Department, said the short-term projects the firm recommended have helped with the odor, but smells have not been eliminated.

She said when the long-term projects are completed they should see even more of a reduction in odor.

Some residents are concerned about the health implications of breathing in the odor.

"My eyes water, my nose burns and I always have a sore throat," Lamonge said.

The odor emitted from the treatment plant is hydrogen sulfide, which is naturally produced when the sewage begins to break down.

Hydrogen sulfide can cause symptoms like headache, dizziness, cough, sore throat, nausea and reddened eyes, but it is dangerous only in very concentrated amounts, according to the World Health Organization.

Newman isn't holding her breath for a solution to the problem. She bought two ionizers for her home to help with the stench from the plant. The county declined her request for reimbursement.