What the heck's going on in New York

[prog]

Apparently a lot of Manhattan, as I type this, smells like the chemical that power companies add to natural gas to make it smell like danger. I'm watching the CNN screen in the Grand Prix cafe now and they're going koo-koo over it, reporters standing on mid-town streets saying they can't really smell anything but have heard reports from all over about the smell.

There's apparently no indications of actually dangerous concentrations of combustible gas yet. But what a strange and interesting thing, to have your whole city smell like you need to disconnect its stove.

Comments

[theeidolon.livejournal.com]

I did my undergraduate research on monolayers made from alkanethiols (the same
chemicals used to tag natural gas to make it odorous). They smell >terrible<. I think
they are used because they can be smelled at some of the lowest concentrations of
any chemicals. So it may have not taken very much of the pure substance to make a
suspicious odor over a very large area. From personal experience, about 1 mL of pure
t-butyl thiol in a chemical fume hood was enough to get the construction workers
rennovating the floor upstairs to call the fire department and have the whole building
evacuated for a gas leak.

[kahuna-burger.livejournal.com]

hmmm, the paranoid part of my brain sees this as the perfect setup for a wide scale attack on the city - tie up workers hunting around for the source, tie up emergency lines with folks reporting possible gas leaks, get the whole "crying wolf" thing going so response to a true emergency slows down...

[prog.livejournal.com]

You typoed "paranoid" for "game master" I think.

[jtroutman.livejournal.com]

The whole basic response was "move along, nothing to see here, there is no danger", yet they could not figure out where it was coming from.

I think this is an indicator of exactly how little the massive amount of $$ spent on "homeland security" will actually help in the event of a real biological or chemical weapon attack.

[duchez.livejournal.com]

Last year, I think, there was another outbreak of "strange smell" in NYC, except that time it smelled good.