Massachusetts Town Hires Professional Landfill Sniffers
Fri, Mar 21, 2008
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I think we may have found a new candidate for the next list of 100 worst jobs in the world.
Here’s a possible job description: Do you enjoy smelling horrible things all day? Can you rate horrible smells on a scale of 1-8? If so, then we’ve got a job for you!
The town of Northampton, Massachusetts is hiring a crack squad of trained noses. The “sniff squad”, as it’s being called, will be brought in to take a good smell of the town’s pungent landfills. The stink-sniffers will be charged with the duty to determine whether or not the landfill reeks too much for neighboring homes to stand.
The effort comes after the state ordered independent odor testing of the landfills. The town signed a whopping $25,000 contract to hire the specially trained noses from an environmental management company in a nearby town.
These are hardly your everyday smelly Joes. The team has been specially trained to be able to not only detect but accurately rate the smelliness of rotting garbage and gases.
They’ll use a scale of 1-8 to determine how smelly the landfills are. That’s a one for “relatively unsmelly” and an eight is something like “rotting dead skunk mixed with the smell you most fear”. To aid them in their ratings, the team carries a special kit with the world’s smelliest scratch and sniff. The scratch cards have smells of various ratings, again 1-8, to help the sniffers match the smell ratings as closely as possible.
There’s money at stake for the city. Should the sniff squad determine the landfills’ reek is too pungent, the city will face fines or have to improve the landfills’ smells somehow.
Info from Yahoo
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March 21st, 2008 at 6:08 pm
D: Ugh. Necessary, but very not fun.
March 21st, 2008 at 8:24 pm
This news story has turned into a game of operator - each time the information is repeated, more facts are wrong. It started out as a small article in a local (W MA) paper and then was picked up by the AP and turned into a ‘crazy story’ feature in yahoo, Fox news, and now the UK. To start, the odor response team is not called the ’sniff squad’ - that is a name made up in this version of the story. Also there is no scratch and sniff kit — there is a set of jars that are used to rank intensity of odor using an n-butanol scale. Yes, this an actual ASTM method. You also can’t do odor response work all day - you quickly become saturated and useless. The list of mistakes goes on and on… Truth and accuracy in reporting? Not in the mass media.
May 7th, 2009 at 1:48 pm
i’m using what odors for a few months now. it’s quite ok.