Sometimes, at night, some strange pollutant settles over my neighborhood. I notice it in the summer when I have the windows open, & never in the daytime. It stinks my eyes, burns my nose, & is generally horrible. I’m not good at describing smells, like ammonia maybe, or something else. Last night it came in through the air conditioner.
I’m pretty sure there is not a giant nocturnal skunk that just sprays my hometown once in a while. What’s going on?
I live in a residential area of a smallish city. There are small horse paddocks within a couple of miles, & a sort of tar-shingle maker some way to the east. I’m not convinced it has anything to do with either of those, as I started noticing it a few years ago, & it’s sporadic.
Sometimes it seems concentrated around a given block, but often it’s hard to pinpoint. Yeah, I’ve tried to chase down the source before, it’s annoying.
I lived in an 80,000 person city for too many years with this exact problem. Occasionally the downtown area would just stink. My (fairly confident) guess was that this old town has open sewers and the atmospheric conditions produced on some summer nights allowed the sewage to ferment and stink and not dissapate. Some kind of temperature inversion thing.
Open sewers are where the house drains (and toilets) hook into the same underground culverts as the storm water run off drains. So every curb opening on the street was a direct line to raw human waste.
There are many reasons why I hate that city, and I could rant for a long time about how crappy of a place it was to live…this is just one of the reasons.