On an early October morning, someone complained that the city of Richmond smelled like “50 skunks,” according to government documents. Not one skunk. Not two. Fifty skunks.
The Bay Area has a lot of stinky smells and places, but only the foulest, malodorous and toxic smells, which can be bad for your health, should be reported to the Bay Area Air Quality Management District, an intercounty agency responsible for investigating odor complaints.
Some smells are so egregious they can only be described as “gagging,” “bad,” “horrible” and “just terrible.” Others, like “50 skunks,” are more creative and over-the-top, yet in its case, the complainant did not provide a specific location, so investigators couldn’t confirm the stench. Even with a location, however, most odor complaints are never confirmed.
Every year thousands of complains are filed against odors for smelling like rotten eggs, sewage, garbage, dirty diapers, smoke, fumes, burning food, paint, chemicals and the list goes on. The troubling smells and where they come are usually not revealed to the general public.
In order to find out where the foulest smelling places are in the Bay Area, I submitted a public records request for all odor complaints within the last five years. The air quality agency, which goes by the acronym BAAMQD, sent me back 12,000 complaints.
I categorized the 12,000 descriptions into four stinky categories: garbage, burning/chemicals, Just terrible and rotten/sewage.
The map below plots the location and density of all the foul odor complaints. The more the complaints reported for an area, the darker the color. Each category is a layer on the map. Click on the stench category of your choosing to see which areas have the thickest density of complaints.
Below is a cluster map, which shows the number of complaints per cluster. Notice how many complaints are in Milpitas, at the very end of the Bay. Two thirds of all the complaints are for the Newby Island Sanitary Landfill, Recycler and Compost Facility, which also is next to the Zero Waste Energy Development Company, San Jose/Santa Clara Regional Wastewater Facility and the surrounding bay lands—salt ponds, marshes and conservation areas.