Rotting Fruit Causes Evacuation
One of the world’s worst-smelling fruits got left behind in a building, and later caused an evacuation after it started rotting.
By DAVID on April 30, 2018
Is that a gas leak? Nope, just a rotting fruit. This fruit smells so bad even when it’s fresh that it’s been banned from a lot of places. You can’t bring it on airplanes, and you can’t take it on the subway with you either. So what’s it smell like when it’s rotting?
The fruit is called the durian, and it looks like a brownish-green spikey dog toy. It’s smell has been described as a cross between rotting meat, onions, and gym socks. And yes, it’s actually used in food, and 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.
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.
