What's the worst thing you've ever smelled?

Why oh why did I open this thread???

:eek:

When I was a cook in the Army, we didn’t git an ice supply for 3 days. A 40 cu. ft. ice chest full of beef ,pork and chicken sitting in the hot Texas Sun! (puckycon).

Nah, North Florida. Lots of the wells are sulphur, particularly at camping sites. And lots of paper mills there too. When I visit there now, I still notice the smell but it doesn’t smell nasty to me.

There’s an Early American Candle Shop near here. My mother and I were out shopping here and there one day, and decided to check it out.

Did I mention they make their own candles? Their own scented candles? Ugh, oh dear god, the entire place was a huge, cloying, sickening mixture of every kind of pot pouri that ever existed.

I guess they had some nice home stuff, but I remember very little of it-the stench was so awful. We left the building and you could smell it in the parking lot. I had to go home and take a long, hot, soap shower before I could begin to get that smell off of me. It was in my hair, and I ended up having to take a four hour nap to sleep off the killer migraine it triggered.

I think I’ve posted this before, but here goes. I work at an environmental company (as in the kind that actually cleans it up, does sampling, monitoring etc, NOT the bunny huggers who uselessly drive their boats around drilling platforms harrassing the workers).

One of our projects was sampling hazardous waste streams (various hazardous materials such as fuels, paints and solvents that have been used, or gone over their shelf life that are being disposed of and are supposed to fall into a set profile in order for proper disposal).

Since this particular facility was on a military base, we also got a lot of “unknowns” unmarked cans and drums of some unknown substance that airmen would bring in after having been out and about on recreational activities in the backwoods on base.

The Transportation, Treatment and Storage Facility had an outdoor storage unit for toxic, aerosols and unknown waste. Well, 6 of us went into this little unit and smelled something a bit “off”. We found the bucket containing the material we were to sample and opened it up.

An incredibly foul and penetrating miasma instantly filled the tiny space, and you’ve never seen 6 people exit a tiny building with such speed and agility!

After donning respirators my coworker and I went to retrieve the bucket and bring it outdoors, where at least we’d have some fresh air around us. Even through the respirators we could smell it and the look of the stuff!!! Thick yellow and green goop of some sort mixed in with rotting leaves and vegetation.

We managed to collect enough of the goop to cover all analytical parameters and then we shut the stuff back up and put it back.

I wish I still had the paragraph from the lab. It included something to the effect of " …based upon the quite obvious odor of the material, which was indicative of decaying animal matter…it has been determined that the sample will not be analyzed…clearly of organic origin…" and so on.

Turns out, the stuff was bear bait (rotten food mixed with bacon grease, fish guts, whatever you can find) that had been slowly rotting away and becoming more and more rancid with each passing season, until some unwitting airman found it and thought it HAD to be agent orange or some such, and brought it to us.

Type is not in the least sufficient to describe the stuff. Let me put it this way, we were very glad we hadn’t eaten breakfast that day, we didn’t really eat any of our lunch or dinner either and it was at least two weeks before our appetites returned to anything approaching normal. A person could poke a toothpick end into the stuff, spread it on a small cardboard square, seal it and sell it as the most effective appetite suppressant known to mankind.

Haven’t we done this thread before?

I posted my worse ones in the previous thread but last night we had a little bad smell at work. Someone brought in two baby opossums that had still been attached to their dead mom. Mom had been dead for a couple days at least. I could smell the death when the guy walked in the clinic. I expected to see a couple near dead possums but they were feisty and healthy looking and desperately clinging to some remaining bits of mom. It was mostly hair with fly eggs in it but it was nasssty. I have to give props to the people who pulled the dead mother possum out from under their house and then pried the little babies off of her. We put on gloves, picked up the babies and tried to pry the bits of mom out of their strong little grips and quickly threw out the box and remaining bits of mom.

One of the feisty little buggers later squeezed out of the one inch holes in the carrier and I had to chase him all over the kennel.

Heh. Letter carrier noted buildup of mail at the home of an elder, and the ambulance was dispatched. We med the PD who booted the door. Officer took two steps in, backed out and blew chow over the porch railing. I keyed my radio to call dispatch for an engine at reduced speed for SCBA. Gramma looked like a possum on the roadside, all bloated up from the heat, smellin’ stanky.

It’s times like these I’m glad I don’t have a sense of smell. I’m not sure it makes up for all those times I’ve eaten food that wasn’t visibly or audibly rotten, but it’s a start. :slight_smile:

Upon seeing the thread title, my boyfriend replied, “An old man on a bus in China.”

I don’t think mine is that, but it probably was one of the special smells I smelled in a hutong in Beijing.

That is a bad smell. Not the worst I’ve ever smelled, but I am planning to do that once again when I re-quit. It was a helpful tool for the other quit.

My father’s chest freezer stopped working in the summertime. As my mother was very ill… Long story. Anyway. 8 foot or so huge chest freezer full of food, most especially indeedy with lots and lots of meat. On sale, buy in bulk, stock up, doncha know…

That was a Very Bad Smell, and it lingered for months. It’s probably still lingering around in the basement of that old house.

My dad once decided to get rid of a huge pile of dead MayFlies (we called them Fish Flies) by burning them. He started a fire before he went to work in the morning. The wind shifted towards the house later on, and I had to figure out a way to get close enough to put the fire out…

Imagine dead, rotting fish and insects, burning under a slow smolder.

Worst unexpected smell: peeing into a fire. Didn’t think it would produce any odor at all!

When I was a kid in Queens, there was a soap factory not far from my home- when it was operating, it created a stench (animal fats?) that nothing else I’ve encountered has ever approached.

danceswithcats, we weren’t even called for the dead guy in the hot tub. We were called for one of the cops who found him, passed out and hit his head.

Strangely (or not, given the morbid interests of most Dopers), we have done this one before:

What’s the stinkiest oder you have encountered?

As I said there, the worst smell I ever encountered was the vast, open tannery in Morocco (Fes, maybe? I can’t remember what city). The smell of rotting animal hides was so thick in the air you could cut it with a knife.

Two years ago I had my car stunk up by a dead dog that resided in the vehicle for a day (long story).

A month after that thread I wound up trading the car in on a new, less smelly ride.

I had a kidney infection, so spent a couple of weeks in the renal ward… In August… with no air-conditioning. shudder.

A guy that had died in an un-airconditioned house in the middle of summer. When we got to him, he was all over the walls and the ceiling.

You know the smell that’s added to natural gas so you can smell it? I was once in a local mall when an ex-employee of the local gas company released a canister full of the stuff.

The government decided to repave the road outside my house noe fine April day. When the temperature hit 90 degrees.

One summer day a skunk was hit and killed by a car outside my house on Saturday night. The smell of concentrated skunk spray and rotten corpse on Monday morning was amazing.

Yes, it’s Fes. I went there a couple of years ago. It was bad, but bearable. (I liked the way they hand a sprig of mint to you as you go in, so you can hold it under your nose!)
The worst and most lingering smell I can remember? Hmm. When I was at school, one year we had to make a christingle in religious ed. class, just before Christmas. The christingle is a kind of religious ornament type of thing, made from an orange, with cloves and stuff stuck in the skin and then tied up with a ribbon.

Well, having made this fective citrus thing, I slung it in a plastic bag with my football kit to bring home. I then forgot all about it over the Christmas holidays.

First week back at school, I open my bag to get my football kit out. :eek: Everything’s gone rotten - fluffy green mould all over my sports gear, a putrid sweet-smelling brown liquid in the bottom of the bag. The horror…