Oak Park stinks.
But why, and of what?
More Top Picks Best Heavy Punching Bags
The village and the Illinois Environmental protection Agency (IEPA) have been receiving complaints recently of bad smells primarily in south Oak Park, though there also have been smell complaints from Berwyn and River Forest.
The smells are strong enough to give some residents headaches and others are using inhalers to combat the odors. The smells usually are detected late at night or very early in the morning.
The IEPA and the village have sent staff out to track down the odors and their sources but so far have found nothing.
What is strange to me is that there doesn’t seem to be one odor, but instead a whole bunch of different bad smells.
On the Oak Park Odor Nuisance Tracking Page on Facebook, the bad smells are variously described by different people as a rendering plant, chemicals burning, sewage, blacktopping, tar, burnt plastic, rotten eggs, burning plastic, burning fecal matter, incinerator emissions, sulfur.
It would seem that every stench there is has made its home in south Oak Park.
Is that possible?
How can such a variety of bad smells all of a sudden show up in Oak Park?
And what about people like me? I live in south Oak Park and I have smelled none of the above-mentioned smells. For years, usually on a warm summer night, we’d get a whiff of the sanitary district from down south in Stickney.
But, other than that, the only smell in south Oak Park that I am aware of is a very good smell indeed from the Oak Park Bakery on Oak Park Avenue and Garfield Street.
So, what’s going on?
Or not going on?
Is this some kind of mass hallucination? Are we suggestively smelling what others say they are smelling?
And how to account for the variety of smells reported?
The only way to figure all this out is through continued reporting and investigation.
If you have an odor to report, call the Illinois Environmental protection Agency at 800-782-7860. You can send an email to the IEPA at www.epa.illinois.gov.
Or call the Cook County Department of Environmental Control at 312-603-8928.
Meanwhile, I will keep a nose out to smell what I can smell.
This has to stop. Oak Park is justifiably famous for many things.
More Top Picks Best Bakers Racks For Kitchens
Reeking should not be one of them.
Paul Sassone is a freelance columnist for Pioneer Press.