RAINY DAYS AND SUNDAYS ALWAYS GET ME DOWN “So it stinks like something awful again where I am today (the Heights). I look at the calendar and realize it’s been 2 prime dump days in a row, a wet Sunday followed by a national holiday. An old friend of mine who grew up on the east side used to say that a Sunday when it rained was the perfect day for all the refineries to release their nastiest emissions, because the rain masked it and for some reason there wasn’t any enforcement on the weekend. I’m wondering where else in the city it smells like what I’m smelling, and is there any truth to the rainy-day-dump theory? That’s some strong anecdotal evidence in my nostrils.” [Swamplot inbox]
Sign up for the Newsletter
Well what the hell ARE you smelling?
A description would help: Is it Eggy? Poopy? Deathy?
Throw me a freakin bone my friend.
If you’re on Oxford just above White Oak then I’m pretty sure thats just sewer. I feel bad for the people who bought those new houses there because it’s stunk like that for years and I’m betting it won’t go away soon.
I had a professor in college that taught us all the best times to dump waste and release emissions. It’s been too long ago for me to remember what he said. He was an old school engineer who worked on the Apollo program. He also told us that anytime you do a project in Louisiana you should be sure to bring bribe money. Now I work on the design of refineries and chemical plants. We do studies during flare stack design to make sure that nothing that’s vented can reach a populated area in a high enough concentration to matter. I doubt the plants in Baytown were built with the same attention to emissions as the new ones we build now. Some of the flares we build now are as tall as 650 feet.
Greens Bayou in Greenspoint smells like that all the time. It’s awful. Maybe they can sprinkle some baking soda and/or crack on it to soak up the fumes.
Jimbo,
So you’re advice would be to buy on a rainy day…just to be sure?
jgriff,
“I had a professor in college that taught us all the best times to dump waste and release emissions.”
Was he really talking about chemical plants or just dating ettiquete?
the smell is likely from the water washing out all the crap in the sewers, bayous, and drainage ditches. since the heights has a ditch in most front yards, the smell is likely worse there.
ripl*
.
.
rolling in puddle laughing
In Westmoreland Place it’s similar to that wonderful aroma of charcoal starter fluid. And it does seem more intense on cloudy days. Particularly in the early morning. So maybe everyone is barbequing at 5 am, or starting a nice cozy fire in the fireplace at 5 am using real logs that they use charcoal starter fluid to start, or maybe something wicked this way came. From the east. Where all those refineries and chemical plants that no longer pollute are. Just a coincidence I’m sure.
I always heard that they release stuff from chemical plants/refineries on Christmas Day and New Years. The same reasons, no enforcement.
This is no sewer smell. It’s “the smell of money,” quite clearly. Like green funk, if you need words. It hung in the fog, and now it’s dissipated a bit with the wind blowing. Near I45 and N. Main, Brookesmith.
You must be smelling the plebs driving by in their American cars. Just wait till that bastion of the middle class, Wal-Mart, opens in your neighborhood. Ugh! The smell of fresh-cut coupons!
Not to mention the diapers they will leave in the parking lot.
America – regressing toward the mean in more ways than one!
i have so many horrible memories from running in my high school days back in pasadena on warm, humid days. felt like you could cut the air in half and make a full course meal out of it.