Howard Stern Can I Smell Your Sweety Beef
Gas-Like Odor Permeates Parts of New York City
A strong odor permeated parts of New York City and nearby areas of New Jersey during the morning commute today, forcing several schools and companies to evacuate and interrupting traffic along some subway and train lines. Authorities investigating widespread reports of the smell, which some described as a gas-like odor, said it did not appear to be harmful.
New York City agencies and the United States Coast Guard responded to numerous calls on emergency telephone lines. Fire trucks raced around in search of the odor.
"I started smelling it right when I got out of Penn Station," said Ivolett Bredwood, a legal assistant, who said she noticed the odor shortly after her New Jersey Transit train arrived in Manhattan around 8:45 a.m. Ms. Bredwood said she continued smelling the odor on her walk to her office, at 99 Park Avenue.
"It is a really strong gas smell, like cooking gas, not gas from a car," she said in a telephone interview. "It is sickening."
The smell was reported from Midtown Manhattan to Battery Park City, and strong odors were reported in Jersey City, said a spokesman for New York's emergency management office, Jarrod Bernstein. Tim Hinchey, a spokesman for the Fire Department, said reports of a gas odor started coming in shortly before 9 a.m.
A woman was taken away by ambulance, apparently overcome by the smell, according to the cable news channel New York 1. At least two people were hospitalized for shortness of breath, CNN reported.
Managers of the Equitable Building on Seventh Avenue, between West 51st and West 52nd Streets, announced around 9:15 a.m. that they had closed the air vents to the building.
Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg said in a news conference around 11 a.m. that the city had yet to pin down the source of the smell and that information was changing frequently. But he said a construction-related gas leak at Bleecker Street in Greenwich Village this morning was a small one of the kind that occurs frequently in the city, and could not account for the widespread smell.
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City air-quality sensors around Manhattan did not detect high concentrations of natural gas, and officials were "very confident" it was not dangerous, he said.
"The smell is there, we don't know the source of it; it does not appear to be dangerous," Mr. Bloomberg said. "And some of the facilities that were evacuated or shut down are now being reopened or put back on line."
Mr. Bloomberg also noted that natural gas itself had no odor, but mercaptan, a chemical that is added to it, did.
Whatever it was, it was sickening, some said.
Norman Thomas High School on the East Side of Manhattan was evacuated around 9 a.m. but classes later resumed, according to WCBS television.
P.S. 3 and Greenwich Village Middle School were also evacuated.
Alfonso Quiroz, a spokesman for Consolidated Edison, said there was no evidence of a major gas leak in Manhattan.
A spokesman for the New Jersey Office of Emergency Management, Sgt. Stephen Jones of the State Police, said that reports of a gas odor were coming from Hoboken, Jersey City, Union City and across Hudson County. He said that the smell was so strong that the Hoboken Police Department temporarily evacuated its headquarters.
Stan H. Eason, a spokesman for Jersey City, said a large concentration of emergency calls came from the Exchange Place area along the Hudson River, across from lower Manhattan. Hundreds of calls were received by the city, but there were no injuries reported.
By 10:15 a.m. Mr. Eason said police and fire officials were certain the smell was not originating from the state's second largest city.
"We're going to get some industrial fans out and blow the smell back over to New York," he said with a laugh.
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Emergency vehicles and fire trucks were stationed along the waterfront, but workers appeared calm.
Michael Williams, 28, an accountant, was standing outside of an office building around 11 a.m. smoking a cigarette. He said he had planned on taking his break around 9:45 a.m. but the odor was so intense he decided to wait.
"I didn't want to spark an explosion or anything," he said.
Renee DiNardi of Public Service Electric and Gas Company, the major natural-gas supplier in New Jersey, said the company received calls from as far north as Weehawken; south to Jersey City and west to Secaucus.
"As of right now, we don't see any problems in our system," she said.
The odor affected the morning commute. Charles Seaton, a spokesman for New York City Transit, said the F train station at 6th Avenue and 23rd Street in Manhattan was evacuated at 9:47 a.m. because of a strong gas odor but it was reopened about 10:15.
PATH trains running from Hoboken to 33rd Street and Journal Square to 33rd Street were stopped at 9:15 a.m. as a precaution, said Steve Coleman, a spokesman.
On at least one New Jersey Transit bus that arrived at the Port Authority bus station this morning, several passengers who had been sitting in the back of the bus told the driver as they got off that there was something wrong with the bus because they could smell natural gas.
Mysterious odors come and go in the New York City area, sometimes never identified.
In August, a pungent smell wafted through Staten Island, alarming hundreds of residents. The City Department of Environmental Protection dispatched a hazardous materials crew, using equipment to test air quality for "volatile organic compounds," which are emitted from a range of products from stored fuels to aerosol sprays to paint.
But the investigation into its source proved fruitless.
In a city scared of terrorism, pungent odors, sweet or sour, can raise vague worries about some kind of chemical attack.
In October 2005, an extraordinary sweet smell wafted from downtown Manhattan to the Upper East Side, Prospect Heights in Brooklyn and parts of Staten Island.
At that time, too, city authorities were rallied. The city's Office of Emergency Management contacted the Police and Fire Departments, state emergency response agencies in New York and New Jersey, and the United States Coast Guard, which communicated with tugboats and container ships at sea to determine whether the odor was being detected there. The cause was not determined.
Source: https://www.nytimes.com/2007/01/08/nyregion/08cnd-odor.html
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