RAISING A STINK
FINDING SOURCE OF MYSTERY SMELL ELUDES DELCO PROBERS
The county has narrowed its search field for a mysterious petroleum odor that keeps assaulting the county to two or three areas it is watching “very closely,” including one in southern New Jersey, according to Emergency Services Director Tim Boyce.
“The operating theory is it’s a fixed facility of some sorts,” said Boyce. “A storage place, a manufacturer, a rail yard, the ships in anchorage … It doesn’t appear that it’s a transient issue. It’s just happened too many times.”
The county has seen three major events including one just about a week ago that quickly blew through Chester on the way to New Castle County, Del., Boyce said.
The first event took place in the western part of the county on the morning of Oct. 25, but officials were never able to track its source. The 911 Center began receiving calls around 10 a.m. that day from police, firefighters and residents in the area of Chester Heights, Aston and Concordville of an unidentifiable odor that smelled like gasoline or home heating oil.
The second came in midNovember, with an odor reported along the Industrial Highway in Ridley Park and Chester. Boyce said his department worked with first responders and the state Department of Environmental Protection to try to pinpoint the source of the smell, but the concentration was too thin for meters to pick up.
The DEP is heading up the investigation and has now assigned someone full time to the Chester Fire Department for faster response times in the event another release occurs.
Boyce said his department is supporting the investigation, and has secured grants and county funding for additional weather stations in the area. The department is also now using a crowdsourcing weather service called Weatherlink.com, which provides a more accurate, realtime representation of winds on the ground by combining data from private and public weather stations.
This will help his department to know not only where the odor is coming from, but also where it is heading in case an evacuation order needs to go out to a school or other facility.
The DEP has meanwhile been going over records including aerial photography and inspecting many facilities around the county, Boyce said, and has partnered with air quality department sin New Jersey and Delaware to make sure it isn’t something originating from out-of-state. The National Weather Service has also joined the hunt.
Boyce said Chester had several reports over the summer of a gas-type smell, but those appeared to be smaller, isolated incidents. One person driving in Chester Sunday between 9:30 a.m. and 9:50 a.m. said she encountered a heavy smell that she at first thought was an automotive problem with the truck in front of her.
“But, then I was like, ‘Is this THE smell?’” she wrote in an email. “After a while, I wasn’t sure I was going to be able to breathe – thank God my car moved out the area. …I really almost thought about pulling over – it was really heavy on my chest, like a heavy weight and I worried about my breathing.”
Boyce said “THE smell” is more of a petroleum-type odor. Emergency services have had a hard time tracking it because they have had to rely on calls coming in from residents complaining of the odor – some of which might not even be related.
“Some people report gas and different fumes,” he said. “People say, ‘I live near the refinery, it smells like this, is it that regular odor or something else?’”
But with the addition of the Weatherlink information, aerial photographs, backing of the DEP and money to add more weather stations, Boyce said he hopes to be able to zero in on the next release – if it occurs – with more precision.
Boyce said fire departments in the area are also going to be receiving upgraded handheld weather meters they can use on scene to determine the makeup of the odor and more state resources will be coming in in the next few weeks for longerterm testing.
“There’s a lot going on and I hope within the next two weeks even more will go on,” he said.
Boyce added that if the DEP identifies the source and finds that it is a legal matter, it will forward its findings to the state Attorney General’s office, which would then take up its own investigation.
Boyce said “THE smell” is more of a petroleumtype odor. Emergency services have had a hard time tracking it because they have had to rely on calls coming in from residents complaining of the odor – some of which might not even be related.