We're not just talking an "oh, that was a little stinky" kind of smell. We're talking a rotten blood, stale beer, "I wonder if I should see a doctor after breathing that" wall of fumes. The putrid air seemed to hang over much of the town for 3-4 days every week. It was particularly nasty on hot and humid summer days.Great example of the "Streisand effect." Now, the website — titled "Should you move to Sibley, Iowa?" — or news of the lawsuit is likely to come up in searches for Sibley.
At the time I lived very close to the offending facility. It was absolutely terrible, we couldn't open our windows in the spring, summer or fall thanks to the seemingly malignant stench. Driving down 10th Street would make you instantly regret using your vehicle's air conditioner. And need I mention: the facility is located right down the block from Superfoods, the only grocery store in town.
Here's the Courthouse News article about the judicial decision, which is also describe a the top of the "Should you move to Sibley" page.
It's worth noting that the plant that emitted stink is gone (as the "Should you move" page says).
Posts
15 comments:
Back in the early 1980s, Texas A&M built a new residence for their new chancellor. It was built jsut across the street from the pig facility used by the Ag students. At an open house, a local reporter caught a whiff of the pigs across the road, and asked the new guy what he thought of the smell. The new guy endeared himself to Aggies old and new by answering, "Smells like money."
There was a rendering plant located in a town several miles from here that had the same problem. On a bad day the smell could be overwhelming for those who lived nearby.
My brother recently moved to a small town in Iowa with a number of nearby feedlots. Depending on which way the wind blows it can get pretty rank. In fact, now that I've looked up Sibley, I see he's only about 50 miles away.
People who work for governments at every level tend to be silly.
I lived in Pampa,TX for awhile in the late 70s. There was a paint plant on one end of town ans a rendering plant on the other. To paraphrase Bob Dylan, you only needed a nose to know which way the wind blows.
I've lost most of my sense of smell and have not noticed any bad smell in years. I'm sort of intrigued by the idea. What was it like, smelling something bad? You feel disgusted and physically impinged upon. You feel nudged to take action... get out! Before things got more scientific, people use to assume that bad smelling air was the source of diseases (even when they had strong evidence that the problem was in the water).
Ann Althouse said...
I've lost most of my sense of smell and have not noticed any bad smell in years. I'm sort of intrigued by the idea. What was it like, smelling something bad?
I have similar limitations.
For the first monthish in Afghanistan it always smelled awful. Then it went away.
You would think without cities and cars and all of the awful pollution we make here in the US the air quality in Afghanistan would be clean and nice. You would be wrong. The air has a constant haze of dust picked up from the ground.
Then you realize what they fertilize with and what the dust is.
I think enough applications of foreign shit holes did my sense of smell in.
So egregious is the 1A violations this guy should be suing each one of the officials involved personally, you know, the ones that took oaths to obey the Constitution. If there is any right more clearly established - that's the USSC's standard to defeat immunity claims - than 1A rights, I don't know what they would be.
My experiences with stinky towns is different.
McCormick spice company had a factory/warehouse in the Baltimore Inner Harbor area when we lived in Baltimore in the very early 80s. Always a different scent - strong smell actually - in the area. Cinnamon was very nice. Cloves sometimes. Also herbal smells from time to time.
And in Cambridge, MA, the New England Confectionery Company made their eponymous Necco Wafers in a factory on Mass Ave very close to MIT; you'd walk by it on the way from Boston's Back Bay to Harvard Square. They didn't cook up the candy every day, but when they did: bliss!
The joke when I was a kid was "My girlfriend told me to kiss her where it stinks, so I took her to Milpitas." Milpitas is the home of the garbage dump and sewage treatment facility.
I was stationed at Fort Lewis, Washington, in 1984. It was just south of Tacoma, which had a paper mill. It was the source of what we called the "Tacoma aroma." Very stinky!
My husband's birthplace, Nekoosa, WI, is known as "Stinkytown" to those who lived there--and moved. It's a paper mill town, so I suspect it is true, or at least, was true, of other paper mill cities, including all those along the Fox River.
"smells like money" and jobs for teenagers that need to launch, else go without gas money and have to take a bus, To say nothing about encourageing learners and strivers. Aka T voters.. A few web searches are are all it takes to find out this is like homeowners that benefited from perfectly good but cheaper homes underneath landing paths at airports, they bought near a rendering plant. Meat packing plants, same reason their are none of good jobs in Chicago. Before you knew it we were all paying the bill in terms of noise control costs, and uncompensated takings, because no one considered the big-bad corporations the "little guy" worthy of defense. Two web searches confirmed all this. Now the community wants to take their "money and good paying entry jobs with them" hopefully making an example to other NIMBY communities, who will demand we the people compensate the victims of those displaced by the powerful with welfare, rather than their than their neighbors writing the new zoning ordinance as part of buying them out and paying for their new property and relocation far from noses. All of which generate new voters in the next election. Those that believe in the Golden Rule, vice the progressives, as in progressive heart disease, a disease of the spirit and sense of right and wrong, that kills civil society, and erodes the trust of each other step by step.
On the near north side of Chicago you could smell the chocolate from the Blommer's factory near the river. Locally, you could buy the cocoa shells to mulch the flower beds. It would smell like chocolate for a while when it rained.
Had that 'smell of money" momment once when visiting Raleigh-Durham in NC years ago. Certainly true at one time.
Post a Comment