Perhaps why many people in downtown Glenwood Springs smelled ... - Glenwood Springs Post Independent

Perhaps why many people in downtown Glenwood Springs smelled natural gas on Monday | PostIndependent.com

Perhaps why many people in downtown Glenwood Springs smelled natural gas on Monday

Glenwood Springs smelled like rotten eggs on Monday, and it wasn’t from the sulfur springs.

On Monday evening, multiple residents and businesses in downtown Glenwood called the fire department to report smelling natural gas.

The smell seemed to be detected throughout the downtown core, causing the Glenwood Springs Fire Department to spend hours searching for it.

“The fire department chased it through town for hours yesterday,” Glenwood Springs Fire Chief Gary Tillotson said on Tuesday. “We never found where the smell was coming from.”

Tillotson said that one time they had an incident like this before where a truck was transporting the chemical mercaptan through town with no lid, causing the smell to be detected throughout town.

Mercaptan is a harmless chemical that is added to natural gas to give it its distinctive rotten egg odor.

“We had multiple calls from people coming home from work,” Tillotson said.

The chemical is transported separately from natural gas, and is added to natural gas regularly since it loses potency faster than natural gas itself.

Since the smell was detected in multiple places throughout the downtown area of Glenwood Springs, Tillotson said it was most likely the mercaptan gas being leaked somewhere, and then getting sucked into houses and businesses through air conditioning systems and swamp coolers.

The odor gets trapped in buildings through the different air cooling units and was unable to dissipate as easily as it would outside. Tillotson also said faint smells were trapped specifically in bathrooms most likely because the bathroom has vents connecting to outside of the building.

“Propane and natural gas companies handle that chemical mercaptan in bulk,” Tillotson said. “The smell can stink up a quarter of a mile radius.”

The fire department verified that it was not a hazard yesterday. If it was a large-scale natural gas leak, the fire department would have found the source, Tillotson said.

Though it turned out to not be a hazard, Tillotson said that residents and businesses in Glenwood Springs did the right thing.

“The smell is added to gas for a reason,” he said. “And when people smell that they need to move out without switching light switches and call 9-1-1.”

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