What he didn't know killed him

I think most of us have smelled that "natural gas" smell at some point. Of course, it isn't the gas we're smelling, it's the chemical methyl mercaptan which is added so that we can detect if gas is leaking.

Now imagine waking up and finding your whole city smells like that, or worse, the city to your immediate north, as those in New Jersey found this morning.

I heard Mayor Bloomberg assure citizens this morning that there does not appear to be any danger. If there was a leak of gas, it disperses so rapidly there is no danger of combustion.

But as I listened, I thought, as I often do when I listen to the news, what if this is not what it seems? What if this is like the Army's biological warfare test conducted on the citizens of San Francisco in 1950?

As the San Francisco Chronicle reported a couple of years ago:

For six days in late September 1950, a small military vessel near San Francisco sprayed a huge cloud of serratia particles into the air while the weather favored dispersal.

Then the Army went looking to find out where it landed. Serratia is known for forming bright red colonies when a soil or water sample is streaked on a culture medium -- a property that made it ideal for the bio-warfare experiment.

Army tests showed that the bacterial cloud had exposed hundreds of thousands of people in a broad swath of Bay Area communities including Sausalito, Albany, Berkeley, Oakland, San Leandro, San Francisco, Daly City and Colma, according to reports that later were declassified. Soon after the spraying, 11 people came down with hard-to-treat infections at the old Stanford University Hospital in San Francisco. By November, one man had died. Edward Nevin, 75, a retired Pacific Gas and Electric Co. worker recovering from a prostate operation, had succumbed to an infection with Serratia marcescens that attacked his heart valves.

The outbreak was so unusual that the Stanford doctors wrote it up for a medical journal. But the medics and Nevin's relatives didn't find out about the Army experiment for nearly 26 years, when a series of secret military experiments came to light. [Emphasis added.]

So I'm thinking, what if this is more than a bizarre 'accident?' While gas was not detected at the city's air monitors, the smell of mercaptan was omnipresent for hours. What if the government added mercapsan to some other substance and sprayed it one way or another in New York City?

The obvious motive that comes to mind is that the government wants to see what might happen were a biological agent to be released in the city. Simple reports of the smell would tell the experimenters all they'd need to know regarding how far the substance spread.

Whatever the case, despite assurances from Mayor Bloomberg that there is nothing to fear and no danger to citizens, Reuters is reporting that 19 people have so far been hospitalized:

NEW YORK (Reuters) - A powerful, mysterious smell of gas wafted through much of Manhattan and parts of New Jersey on Monday, forcing building evacuations and a temporary suspension of commuter train service before dissipating by mid-afternoon.

Officials were quick to stress that the natural gas-like odor was not dangerous, but at least 19 people went to hospital suffering minor complaints and its wide extent provoked jitters in a city that is constantly reminded of the September 11 attacks.

Twelve people were taken by ambulance to New York hospitals by emergency workers responding to calls from people complaining of upset stomachs, dizziness or difficulty breathing, a Fire Department spokesman said.

...Seven people went to the hospital seeking treatment in New Jersey, ... although New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg said the odor was not dangerous and no unusual gas leaks had been found. . . .

"The city's air sensors do not report any elevated level of natural gas," he said. . . .

A U.S. Department of Homeland Security spokesman said there was no indication of a terrorism connection. . . .

Four schools in Manhattan were briefly evacuated, and the smell chased people out of landmarks such as the Rockefeller Center and Macy's department store.

"It was really, really bad then, so bad it gave me a headache," said Kate Browne, who lives in the West Village neighborhood and said she could smell the gas when she took her daughter to school.

This is my problem with the news. Fifty-six years ago, the people in San Francisco were told nothing was wrong, either, even though the results became one for the record books.

I hope and pray that the people of New York are safe, and that if this is some secret experiment, it will not cause any permanent damage to citizens and visitors to that great city. I also hope and pray it will not take us another 26 years to find out what really happened there.

Updates:

More test info - read the last sentence in this quote and ponder this possible use of mercaptan:

In other tests in the 1950s, Army researchers dispersed Serratia on Panama City, Fla., and Key West, Fla., with no known illnesses resulting. They also released fluorescent compounds over Minnesota and other Midwestern states to see how far they would spread in the atmosphere. The particles of zinc-cadmium-sulfide -- now a known cancer-causing agent -- were detected more than 1,000 miles away in New York state, the Army told the Senate hearings, though no illnesses were ever attributed to them as a result.

Another bacterium, Bacillus globigii, never shown to be harmful to people, was released in San Francisco, while still others were tested on unwitting residents in New York, Washington, D.C., and along the Pennsylvania Turnpike, among other places, according to Army reports released during the 1977 hearings.

In New York, military researchers in 1966 spread Bacillus subtilis variant Niger, also believed to be harmless, in the subway system by dropping lightbulbs filled with the bacteria onto tracks in stations in midtown Manhattan. The bacteria were carried for miles throughout the subway system, leading Army officials to conclude in a January 1968 report: "Similar covert attacks with a pathogenic [disease-causing] agent during peak traffic periods could be expected to expose large numbers of people to infection and subsequent illness or death."

Army officials also found widespread dispersal of bacteria in a May 1965 secret release of Bacillus globigii at Washington's National Airport and its Greyhound bus terminal, according to military reports released a few years after the Senate hearings. More than 130 passengers who had been exposed to the bacteria traveling to 39 cities in seven states in the two weeks following the mock attack.

The Army kept the biological-warfare tests secret until word of them was leaked to the press in the 1970s. Between 1949 and 1969, when President Nixon ordered the Pentagon's biological weapons destroyed, open-air tests of biological agents were conducted 239 times, according to the Army's testimony in 1977 before the Senate's subcommittee on health. In 80 of those experiments, the Army said it used live bacteria that its researchers at the time thought were harmless, such as the Serratia that was showered on San Francisco. In the others, it used inert chemicals to simulate bacteria.

(Source)

More news from this morning:

"I was coming through the Brooklyn-Battery Tunnel and I heard Howard Stern [on Sirius satellite radio] talk about how he was evacuating his building, so I rolled down my window and I get hit in the face with this potent smell of gas," said Sean Sweeney of West Brighton. "The odor just kept getting stronger and stronger as I drove up the West Side -- but, you know, I figured, 'Hey, it's just New York, it's just another odor.'"

But not one as pleasant as the mysterious maple-syrup-like fragrance that enveloped the city in the fall and winter of 2005.

Rather, it seemed to resemble the mysterious noxious cloud that descended on the North Shore last Aug. 15.

At a news conference yesterday morning, Mayor Michael Bloomberg said the smell may have been that of mercaptan, a sulfurous compound added to natural gas, but added there was no indication the air was unsafe to breathe. "We don't know what it is. It does not appear to be dangerous. ... It may just be an unpleasant smell," he said. "The one thing we are very confident of is that it's not dangerous."

Bloomberg noted that there had been a small gas leak at Bleecker and West Sixth streets, but that it wasn't enough to account for the pervasive odor. By noontime, city officials had reported 500 calls placed to 911.

(Source)

Come on, Mayor Bloomberg. If you don't know what it is, you can't be certain it is safe.

And what about that "noxious cloud" or sweet smell from before? Were those biowarfare experiments?