A city on the stink
Summer-heat inhale hell
What the smell?
It’s the Big Apple’s stinkiest summer in years thanks to three heat waves — as simmering street trash and repulsive odors are prompting a flood of complaints to the city’s non-emergency line, according to data and an expert.
There have been more 311 calls about smells since May 1 than any other year since 2010 — with the exception of 2022, when the city reversed the relaxed street-cleaning rules that were started during the pandemic, city data show.
Grossed-out commuters called it an assault on the schnoz.
“It just hits you in the face, makes you want to throw up,” fumed retail worker Marisol Gomez, 28, who said parts of Midtown are more putrid than usual this year.
“Sometimes I wonder if there are dead rats around . . . . Or are they not cleaning the area as often as they should?” she said. “It’s already stinky, but those days when it’s really hot and humid, it’s nasty.”
Meteorologist Steven DiMartino of Freehold, NJ, said the city’s recent high humidity and temperatures — like the swampy, 90-plusdegree stretch earlier this month — can make smells linger longer and spread farther than usual.
Truly offal humidity
“Temperatures have been above normal, but what has been really record-breaking and impressive has been the humidity, and that’s the key,” DiMartino told Gothamist, which was first to report the soaring odor complaint data.
High levels of water vapor from the humidity diffuse odor molecules, making the air soupy and helping rotting food dissolve from solids into pungent gas.
“The other week, where it literally felt like we were walking out into a sauna, that’s optimal conditions,” said DiMartino.
A garbage truck that might normally send a putrid whiff across a single block can now blast several blocks with a foul scent that stays around longer, he said.
Heat waves cause a temperature inversion — a perfect environment for bacterial growth — which DiMartino likens to a warm locker room with a hamper full of hot, steaming sports jerseys.
“After a long day of practice, you throw your uniforms in the hamper, close the lid and just let it sweat,” he said. “Now when you open up the hamper, i.e., the garbage truck, that stink is really able to grow.”
New Yorkers may be smelling high-growth bacteria in garbage being trapped at street level by a humid heat wave, he said.
Manhattan residents were quick to offer their two scents about the hot garbage summer.
“It is the most disgusting cocktail of all the worst smells I can think of,” Ollie Robinson, a marketing manager from Hell’s Kitchen, tweeted. “The garbage is in there but so is a little bit of sewage, possibly some throw-up. It is bad and it is strong.”
Others compared the city to a big, musty sauna.
“When it gets hot to where it gets humid, it’s worse. Humidity creates funk,” said Robert, 62, who works at a law firm.
Despite thousands of complaints, a spokesman for the Department of Sanitation told The Post there’s actually less trash on the street this year than in past summers.