Building Evacuated Because Of Rotting Fruit
A rotting fruit sparked scare of a natural gas leak, forcing a building to be evacuated for a few hours while crews tried figuring out the problem.
By nowproducerdave on April 30, 2018
No, that’s not a gas leak, it’s just a rotting fruit. This particular fruit smells so bad that even when it’s fresh, you’d wish you never smelled its stench. It’s been banned from a lot of places, like airplanes and subway trains. So if it’s that bad, how bad must it be when it’s rotting?
The fruit is called the durian, and it looks like a brownish-green spikey dog toy. The Durian fruit smell has been described as a cross between rotting meat, onions, and gym socks. Yes, it’s actually used in food too, as well as for medicine. “The fruit’s flesh is sometimes eaten raw, or is cooked and used to flavor a number of traditional Southeast Asian dishes and candies. It’s also used in traditional Asian medicine, as both an anti-fever treatment and a aphrodisiac,” according to this website. The fruit has somewhere around 50 different naturally occurring chemicals that cause the smell.
See also: A poorly chosen Wi-Fi hotspot name causes a building evacuation.
If the normal, fresh version smells that bad, I can only imagine what a rotting one smells like. That’s what these people got to experience though, and it caused an evacuation. People were at a library when the smell broke out, and everyone seemed to think there was a major gas leak in the area. The evacuations happened, and fire crews had to come in and search the area. They were wearing respirators, and were aware that there were dangerous chemicals stored in the same building. After a few hours, they determined that it was just a rotting fruit someone left in a cabinet. The smell circulated the building through the air conditioning ventilation. See the full story here.
