Issue #28, October 6, 2006

Smell This?

Maple Syrup, Propane, Fish, Manure, Chlorine and Potatoes

By Dan Rattiner

Last Monday afternoon, the staff of Dan’s Papers had to be evacuated from our headquarters building in Bridgehampton because of what smelled like a propane gas leak. A few of us bravely went back inside after we got everybody else outside, this publisher included, risking our lives from possible asphyxiation or an explosion, to find the source of the propane leak. It wasn’t in the basement, the ground floor, second floor or attic or out on the second floor outside deck.

And then, after 15 minutes of this, it occurred to me. We don’t use propane anywhere in the building. And I ought to know, because I own the building. And so we ought to inform the police and the fire department about the situation.

What we learned was that the smell of propane caused complaints and evacuations all the way from Kmart down to where we are and investigators had been sent out and they would let us know what they found. In ten minutes they actually stopped in, and said they had been unable to find any source for this leak, and so believe it might have come from a propane delivery truck roaring down the Montauk Highway from west to east spewing stuff from a leaky gas tank as they went. They were going to make phone calls to the propane companies in the area to see if there were any reported cases of — when the guy got there to make the delivery he didn’t have any.

I am a firm believer in smells wafting sometimes great distances from one place to another to cause behavior adjustments. Last winter, there was the case of the maple syrup smell that had settled over Manhattan. I was in the city at the time, and I vividly recall it filling the Jitney bus I was on between 79th Street and 40th as the bus drove down to its final stop before heading out to the Hamptons.

It was in the news later in the day and then that evening on television and then in the newspapers the next morning. It stayed about two hours and nobody really knew what to make of it. Then it went away. What was the appropriate response? Run to the shelters because of an enemy maple attack? Look for the follow up announcing it was a new perfume from Saks and come on over?

There was no maple syrup that might have exploded in the entire city of New York. And it wasn’t butterscotch. Or mocha.

As for this propane attack this week, there was an article in the Wednesday morning New York Post on page 8 about a strange gas that had hospitalized or injured between 40 and 50 people near the IKEA store in Elizabeth, New Jersey. It had happened about 3 p.m. which was just an hour before the propane had descended on the western end of downtown Bridgehampton and it occurred to me this might have been a second swooping down of this “unknown” gas.

This Wednesday edition of the New York Post, however, said this had all happened “yesterday,” which would have been Tuesday in a Wednesday morning newspaper, which would have been a day after our smell, but sometimes a story is delayed and what happened “yesterday” could have referred to Monday, not Tuesday.

The gas in Elizabeth was tracked down to an old unused pressurized gas tank that was being dismantled at an abandoned factory nearby to the IKEA. The workman slipped with the welding torch, the top of the tank popped off, and this gas came rushing out. Nobody knows what the gas was. The owners of the abandoned factory are long gone. Down the street, the strollers dropped their IKEA shopping bags and, stricken, slumped to the sidewalk. One can only imagine the chaos.

In a related matter back here in the Hamptons, the towns of Southampton and East Hampton have been wrestling for the last couple of weeks with the problem of a smell that might soon emanate from a proposed restaurant on the Montauk Highway. The proposal is for a Hampton BBQ, which would be the first of its kind in these parts. It is to be located in the former Alison’s At the Beach restaurant on the corner of the Montauk Highway and Town Line Road in Sagaponack, and as the property is in the Town of Southampton, the town board would be responsible for making the decisions about it. However, it was recently determined that there is a law in the rule book that if any property is within fifty feet of a neighboring town and that town might be affected by the project — such as the gorgeous smell of barbecued pulled pork sandwiches — then the neighboring town has to approve it too. So that’s how East Hampton got involved.

Imagine the smells out here of the salt sea air down at the beach, the smell of horses on a horse farm, the smell of decaying shellfish out at the bays, the smell of fresh mowed lawns at the mansions and golf courses, the smells of potatoes and dirt as the reapers take them out of the ground, the smell of cows and goats, the smell of a field of wildflowers, the smell of fish at the docks, the smell of swimming pool chlorine, the smell of suntan lotion, all wafting upward, drifting this way and that, and then swooping back down at unexpected moments.

So many smells, so little time.