Whoever Smelt It, Dealt It!

In New York, on Monday, all the 911 lines were tied up with calls from Manhattan and New Jersey citizens asking, “What’s that smell?” Mayor Bloomberg responded to the calls by saying that a gas-like odor had spread over the city, but it was not harmful. “The mayor said the smell may have been caused by a leak of a substance called mercaptan that is added to natural gas for safety reasons to give it a recognizable odor. By itself, natural gas is odorless.” Some schools were briefly evacuated and some commuter rails were temporarily stopped due to the fear of the odor.
In 2005, a maple syrup aroma spread across the Manhattan area twice with in a matter of weeks. When environmental specialists came to find where the odor originated, they found nothing dangerous and could not explain the smell. Luckily, citizens of New York will no longer have to worry about the smell of maple syrup in the Big Apple, since Trans Fat was recently abolished. Maybe Mayor Bloomberg should have consulted the chef at a local diner rather than the environmental police.