ECONOMY: Real estate market making some gains A3 Friday, August 10, 2012 Kennedy sisters set to play Nancy O’s next week A10
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Sulphur returns ■ That Smell
Easy
to
Love
Source of odour difficult to pinpoint DeLynda Pilon newsroom@pgfreepress.com
Old timers used to call it the smell of money, that odour in the air you could almost taste like a mixture of rotten eggs and dirty diapers every time you drove down into the bowl of Prince George from higher elevations. The smell has been little more than an unpleasant memory recently, but this weekend it slithered back into the city in force. “It’s definitely sulphur. The question is what type of sulphur. Our monitor measures four different types of sulphur, including hydrogen sulphites which you would find at the pulp mill or refinery. Sometimes when those levels are at 10 or 20 parts per billion, the phone is ringing. This weekend it was at 150 parts per billion and there were hardly any complaints,” Dennis Fudge, air quality meteorologist, said. That may indicate it was another type of sulphur, or it may mean the public is not aware of the complaint line number they can call when they smell an unusual odour. The smell itself, Fudge said, wasn’t just prevalent in the Millar and downtown area, but was in the Lakewood and Westwood areas as well. He said they are getting the numbers in the evenings during a nice sunny clear day with no wind. With conditions like that, once the sun sets over the bowl the cold air sinks and starts flowing into lower terrain, like a river Fudge explained. “It was kind of spread out. As you fill up a bowl, you fill up at the lower elevations first. The Lakewood area was picking up the odour at night. It started in the lower elevations, but was not confined to the downtown, though the lower elevations were getting it much stronger,” Fudge said. “This is the highest we’ve monitored for quite some time. We’ve been getting good air quality readings in the last few years. There were record low pollution levels last year. With improvements the pulp mills made combined with the meteorology the last few years, the number of complaints have been down. In the last week there’s been a big jump backwards.” Pinpointing the exact source of the odour,
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Fudge said, could be difficult even though they know the general direction thanks to wind flow. “We know the general direction but there are different sources. The pulp mill and refinery have different sources, and there are other industries over there as well. We know the general direction but we don’t know what source is causing the really high readings. One of the major possible sources is ponds which hold the impurities stripped from water used in industry. Fugitive emissions can escape with wind picking up the odour and carrying it into urban neighbourhoods. However, whatever the source, it’s unlikely the fumes will hurt anyone in the concentrations the city is seeing. Fudge said that often when reports come in of sulphur odours hitting these levels, they are combined with reports of asthma attacks and respiratory problems. Usually, however, it isn’t the sulphur that’s the issue but other contaminants that can’t be smelled escaping the same source the sulphur came from. However though they can’t monitor the plethora of possible compounds making up the current odour, they do monitor several criteria pollutants, and none of them showed any dramatic spikes alongside the sulphur. Sulphur alone would have to be at one to 2,000 parts per billion to cause serious issues for people. “We might never know for sure what the source is,” Fudge said, adding it’s likely they will, though, be able to narrow it down to a few locations. “We know the general direction and some possible sources.” Because they also measure volatile organic compounds. taking air samples for 24-hour periods, which are sent to a lab that measure 170 compounds, they might be able to look at that data and find signature compounds which will help pinpoint the source of the odour. “We will ask them to expedite the results,” Fudge said, adding that because they come from a federal lab which is backlogged with data from across the nation, it can take six months to get answers. Fudge is encouraging anyone who smells something they think odd to phone complaints into 250-565-4487
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