by CKR
A few years back, northern New Mexico was plagued by a strong natural-gas odor. Many people, including me, were concerned that they had a natural gas leak in their homes. It turned out that someone had turned the wrong valve and introduced too much methyl mercaptan into the natural gas supply.
Since the “natural-gas smell”* in New York and New Jersey seemed to be outdoors as well, it probably has a different explanation.
I haven’t been back to New Jersey in many years, but I do recall, from when I was a child there, the odors along Route 46 in the New Jersey Meadows, that estuarial capital of the chemical industry, and, further south, Seacaucus, the garbage capital of New Jersey. The odors weren’t usually that of natural gas, though. I would also expect that they have been cleaned up in compliance with environmental laws enacted since then.
I usually tend to be anti-alarmist, but someone who wanted to check out the efficiency of dispersal might release methyl mercaptan in the area they planned to attack. The smell would be taken for natural gas, and to the extent that it was more than usual, would be reported in the newspapers. For the price of buying the local newspapers, the potential terrorist would get a rough report of the dispersal pattern.
The smell occurred during a weather inversion, just the conditions that would be ideal for a chemical attack. But an inversion would also keep the cap on an accidental spill.
And we can’t rule out that some government agency was checking out dispersal. They wouldn’t tell us, of course, or they’d have to kill us.
The difference, however, between methyl mercaptan and a real chemical attack is that chemical agents (even polonium-210) are much less volatile than methyl mercaptan. Further, methyl mercaptan smells very bad at very low concentrations. At higher concentrations, it actually gets less smelly.
I’m also wondering about the effectiveness of the detection apparatus around the city. Surely the chemistry departments of the universities had equipment they could use to test the air? And what about the chemical sensors? One reason they might not have picked this up is that they may not be calibrated for methyl mercaptan.
I suppose this will be another of those reports that is never followed up. The Times article mentions a maple-syrup smell from a few months back whose source was never identified. Seems worth following up, though.
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*Natural gas has no odor. Methyl mercaptan is added to it so that people can detect leaks easily. I’m assuming from the reports that it was indeed methyl mercaptan, but it could have been something else.
Update (01/21/07): One possible explanation.