Officials are unsure of the source of the smell on campus, but the industrial area below the Bluff is a possibility
By Rosemary Peters
The first time freshman Renata Fusso noticed the smell was last Wednesday when she was passing Howard Hall on her way to lunch.
"It was a saccharine yet bitter smell that made my nose crinkle," Fusso said. "At first I thought it was just Howard. You know, it's old. Old things tend to smell."
As the week went on, Fusso started to recognize the "putrid" smell more often: in front of the library, the quad and even outside the Commons.
"I finally realized that there must be something going on nearby campus to make it smell so bad," said Fusso. "I was passing the threshold to enter campus when I smelled the horrific smell for the fourth time this week. I even started to gag."
Fusso is not the only student who has complained about a smell that is lurking around campus. The office of Public Safety has received complaints about smells on campus.
"I just try not to smell anymore," freshman Dallas Lund said.
In response to these recent complaints, Jeffery Rook, who is the Environmental Health and Safety Officer located in the office of Public Safety, called the Oregon Department of Environmental Quality.
The Oregon DEQ sent Robert Vance to campus on last Wednesday to investigate the causes of this smell. But as luck would have it, there was no smell around the campus that day.
"It's an unknown smell, we don't really have a source of where it's coming from," Vance said. "The best thing University of Portland can do is keep a log of the time and the wind direction for when the smell is noticed. It's probably coming from the Swan Island area. There are a lot of odors from over there."
Although Vance was not able to locate the cause of the smell this time, he is not the only person investigating the source.
According to Jim Redden of The Portland Tribune, many Portland residents have complained about the smell and the culprit of the smell is the smoke being pumped into the air by large ships docked in Swan Island shipyards.
Redden discovered that in 2005, the Oregon Department of Environmental Quality found that these commercial maritime vessels in the Swan Island shipyard pour 34,400 metric tons of diesel emissions into the air. Furthermore, these vessels also emit sulfur, carbon dioxide and carbon monoxide, among several other pollutants.
In a study performed by the International Council on Clean Transportation, researchers found that these pollutants have been linked to a variety of adverse public health issues, including increased risk for heart and pulmonary diseases and worsened respiratory disease.
This is not the first time that UP has dealt with a smell lingering on campus.
In fact, in November 2006 the Public Safety Department received dozens of calls regarding a strange smell. Students didn't know what the smell was, and they were worried about health risks.
As a result of these complaints, Northwest Natural and the Department of Environmental Quality investigated the problem and found that the odor in November 2006 was caused by pollutants trapped in the lower level of the atmosphere due to a temperature inversion.
The National Weather Service describes a temperature inversion as a thin layer of the atmosphere where a decrease in temperature in accordance with the height is less than it should be normally. An effect of such an inversion is a buildup of pollutants. If the sky is very hazy, sunsets are very red, or there is a bad smell afoot, there is likely an inversion somewhere in the lower atmosphere. However, this is not the case for the present smells.
"As far as we know the smells that occasionally settles on the campus is from industrial operations in the North Portland area, either right off the Bluff at Swan Island, across the river, or further north," Rook said.
"What we have noticed is that when there is a strong temperature change it can be accompanied by a smell possibly from those industrial operations," Rook said.
