North Charlotte Today

It's well known that before natural gas is delivered to customers, the suppliers add mercaptan to the odorless gas so people can smell it if there is a leak in their house. Charlotte Fire had cause to be concerned after multiple residents called in to report suspected natural-gas leaks.

“Charlotte Fire was getting a lot of calls about that natural-gas type smell," Hannah Sanborn Brown, emergency management planning coordinator for the city of Charlotte, said in a recent WBTV report. 

Fortunately, it wasn’t a pipeline leak that could have exploded. Rather, Legacy Environmental Services on North Graham Street was destroying mercaptan tanks and some of the smelly additives were released into the air.

“People were smelling it in uptown Charlotte all the way to the border of South Carolina,” Brown told the news station.

With such a wide area affected, emergency services pinpointed the source of the smell fairly quickly and learned that the weather was partly to blame for the scent lingering. The National Weather Service said an inversion, which occurs when layers form in the atmosphere, kept the odor closer to the ground, making the smell more noticeable.

Charlotte’s emergency services team kept residents informed by sending out text messages, letting people know what was going on. 

“There’s always ways you can learn, but I think the communication was really solid,” Brown said. “We make the contacts and partnerships before the event happens, so that when something does happen we already have the phone numbers and we’ve already had the conversations so that we’re ready to go.”