Nasty Odor Plagues St. Louis Area

www.webster.edu...



The smell is still very strong. I am very curious as to the source of the smell. My guess is someone was drilling somewhere and hit a pocket of gas of some kind. I can't help but wonder if the above link could have anything to do with the smell....

Odors can travel for a long distance. I live about 8 mile east of Hershey Pa and with a light west wind I can smell the coca smell from the factory. Also there are small farms miles away and sometimes they inject or spread liquid manure onto the fields that you can detect with a light wind. East of St Louis there are fields that could be spread with liquid manure also. Check Google earth for the fields I saw and the the wind direction the last few days.

Hi, I live in Jefferson County and the odor has been very strong here. We're down in a valley, about 20 miles south of downtown StL/Arch.

Our area is all electric, with no underground gas lines or above-ground LP tanks, etc.

The smell is very gas-like: propane, methane....We thought the smell might be coming from a septic tank in our neighborhood that was producing some kind of noxious gas.

Once I found out the smell was being noticed all over the STL Metro area, I immediately thought "earthquake!".

Eeeek.

Originally posted by tombombadil
www.crawford2000.co.uk...

A friend just sent me this article......Very scary....!!!!


The smell can be smelled over a very wide area. From the Mississippi downtown all the way to Imperial. It covers the entire metropolitan area and some surrounding counties.

Now that is scary! I wonder if anyone anywhere is keeping track on a map of all of these "small" events. There could be a trend that would allow for the explanation of the bigger cause.

I wonder if St. Louis could be experiencing something called a "Red Tide". We have them here in MD. once in a while and the stench is awful; it smells like rotting death.

en.wikipedia.org...

It has happened in Rivers before.

www.theledger.com...



[edit on 1/26/2009 by CaptGizmo]

Originally posted by wayno
Natural gas seeping from the ground would not have a smell would it, because its the gas company that puts the odour into it? I don't know if the other suggested culprit, Methane has its own smell?
Whatever is up, if there is indeed a confluence of similar occurrences around the globe of masses of dead birds and bad smells then its worth monitoring.

It’s true that the ‘natural gas’ we use for heating and so on has no smell, but many of the gasses that are vented through geologic activity do have obvious odors, sulphur being chief among them. With such a large area being effected, I would suspect geologic activity first.

Does anyone know of any other incidents around the globe of a smell like this...."that was a precursor to any geological or natural disaster type of events" Anything before a earthquake or volcanic eruption...I don't know of any volcanoes around St. Louis but it could be a underground system.
Also, what about the clouds "contrails in the sky"..

I just stepped outside and the smell is still in the air...permeating all around me...There was a story on the local news channel, and they gave no answers just misdirection...

reply to post by pwood


I found this out. Maybe you guys could be right about a geological event.

www.press.umich.edu...

You also don't need a mountain for a volcanic type eruption either.

members.tripod.com...

Maybe it's decomposing or burnt bodies?

They could be using the St. Louis underground as a means of doing away with all those people who have "just disappeared" or "committed suicide" over the years


*shrugs* who knows. There is a horrid stench here in southern florida during the middle fo the week because of the "Mt. Trashmores" around the county burning up garbage. could be that too...

Originally posted by tombombadil

Hello Friends!! I live in St. Louis and I smelled the smell as soon as I pulled my car out of the garage. Its smells like rotten meat to me.

So basically it smells like dead bodies? Doesn't sound good.

I wonder what it is? Might be the sewers?

Smell has been around since late Saturday night/early Sunday morning. The first time I walked outside I immediately thought "decomposing flesh". This morning it began to smell like a really ripe, pungent Brie. We're about 7 miles (15 minutes) due west of downtown and smell finally tapered off this evening.

It does not smell like sulfur or natural gas in this area and I'm sure there's no mass burial ground, I just mention rotting carcass b/c it's different than the sulphur/natural gas odors that people along the Mississippi and in South Saint Louis County have reported smelling.

Another poster mentioned the possibility of Red Tide in the Mississippi and noted that it's often accompanied by a smell of rotting flesh. Not sure how Red Tide works in general, but there's been ice chunks in the Mississippi for a couple of weeks due to extreme cold... I always thought Red Tide came with warmer water (algae growth, etc.).

reply to post by tombombadil


It smells like mercaptan. The odor that is added to natural gas. The EPA probably does not consider it a hazardous material and is not tested for easily though real time testing.

Here's a thought. Are there any hide processing plants (Tannery) in the area?

The smell is horrible from these places....as you could imagine.

I live in south St. Louis and first smelled it on Saturday morning. It smelled like cooked cabage to me. It followed me all over town and out in the burbs. It got me to thinking about that little bit of snow fall we had. Could something have come down with the snow? Like whatever that stuff is they are spraying up there all the time?

Originally posted by deenamarie53
Here's a thought. Are there any hide processing plants (Tannery) in the area?

The smell is horrible from these places....as you could imagine.

I don't know offhand and am too tired to research. I do know the County's really strict about zoning, but also know there's factories/refineries along the River itself.

That being said, even if there were a tannery nearby, surely there would've been a similar situation involving random smells at some point in the memorable past. To my knowledge, the abrupt onslaught of this stench is a unique event. Basically, I don't think that a tannery in the area suddenly encountered a just-right type of wind that would cause a large portion of St. Louis Metro/County and South County to experience the smell we've had in the past few days.

What's amazing to me is that short of a blurb in the local print-media or a 20 second fluff piece in the news, no one's talking about the smell. This just makes STL look even more sad: "News Flash! STL Citizens Remain Completely Unperturbed by Odor that Has Rest of Country Avoiding the Midwest".

Also, didn't NYC have an unexplained smell of molasses blanketing the entire city over the summer? I don't remember them having found the cause for that one either.

My son announced rather loudly as I was letting him out at school that" my car smells like rotten trash" and that I should clean it out right away", before that we thought it was the trash trucks. Nice, then he gets home and says he's sorry, he was wrong, his teacher said our side of Missouri has been taken over by a foul, unidentified smell, like that makes me feel any better.

Last one out of MO. is a rotten egg!

Originally posted by deenamarie53
Here's a thought. Are there any hide processing plants (Tannery) in the area?

The smell is horrible from these places....as you could imagine.

You might be on to something with that

Well, here's a "what if":
What if someone (or group) is experimenting with putting chemicals into sewers to see the effect and spread? Right now the chemicals appear to be only smelly but not harmful; however, in future, if they decide that this works, the smell could be accompanied with some sort of lethality or toxicity as well.

Are these just experiments?
I vaguely remember a couple days last summer of gas like smells up here in Canada too, but not nearly so pronounced as what you have now.