Emergency services received a number of phone calls from concerned Örebro residents around 2am on Friday about a strange smell, local newspaper Nerikes Allehanda (NA) reports.
The stench, which NA readers described as “cat piss”, “vile stench”, “gearbox oil mixed with ammonia”, “surströmming” or even the smell emitted from a packet of pre-cooked meatballs, was strong enough that a number of the newspaper’s readers were unable to get back to sleep.
This isn’t the first time residents of the central Swedish city have woken up to the stench, either – a similar smell of cat urine was reported throughout the city as recently as Saturday, November 4th.
Call operators at emergency phone line SOS Alarm in the region confirmed to NA on Friday that they had had “a lot of phone calls”, but that they were still none the wiser as to the source of the stench.
“We don’t know what it is, but we think it’s from some kind of industry in the north,” alarm operators told NA.
“Nothing’s been confirmed yet, but that’s the assumption,” the operator said, before confirming that the stench is not believed to be harmful.
“No, it just smells horrific. We can smell it here in our offices,” they said.
Last time it stank, emergency service workers eventually tracked the smell down to a recovery boiler at a nearby cardboard factory, although it hasn’t yet been confirmed whether the factory is also behind Friday’s stench.
Recovery boilers produce wood pulp by treating wood chips with sulfite, hence the smell.
Johan Groth, a meteorologist from Stormgeo speaking to NA at the time, added that the situation wasn’t being helped by the weather.
“I think this might be due to an inversion, essentially a situation where the temperature in the air increases and it acts like a lid,” he said.
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