Reality Check Request: Sulfurous Smell in LA Area? (Vanity)

Tofu gas.

Hey, I just drove across the entire LA basin and smelled nothing sulfurous. Nowhere.

That's more a statement about your deficient olfactory system than an observation on the surroundings.

If it was H2s, you’d be dead the second that your nose registered the smell of rotten eggs.

"your deficient olfactory system" - LOL

Yep - could be, but somehow I still manage to smell the roses out front - without having to go put my nose into one of them.

Don’t worry about it; just remember this time of year you have a pretty constant onshore flow from the ocean down around Long Beach. It’s just recirculated human and animal farts from the millions of idiots who still live there. I know because I used to live in Downey and we would get it coming right up the Rio Hondo and San Gabriel river channels every year.
Now I just have to live with the smoke from the forest fires.
Still smells better than LA basin so called air.

Santa Ana’s are offshore winds, they blow everything out to sea.

Didn’t know that the Obamadork was visiting LA.

Not him, just his Master.

No...if you smell H2S it’s a good thing. Once the concentration gets very high (enough to kill you) you will not be able to smell it.

It’s funny that this happened today...I was actually testing an H2S air quality analyzer in Lompoc, CA and I have a cylinder of 50 ppm H2S to test it. It smells BAD!

Unfortunately, The SCAQMD do not outfit any of their air quality sites with H2S air quality analyzers. If they did, we would be able to see activity (if it were H2S).

If it was H2s, you’d be dead the second that your nose registered the smell of rotten eggs.

Not so.

Minimum perceptible odor concentrations are as low as .005 ppm, at 4 ppm the odor is easily detectable, 10 ppm and the eyes start to get irritated, 27 ppm and the odor is strong, 100ppm and the eyes and respiratory tract are noticeably irritated (and the sense of smell paralyzed--you stop smelling it, even if the concentration increases). At 250 ppm prolonged exposure may cause pulmonary edema, and at 500 ppm dizziness and cessation of breathing in a few minutes.

Rapid unconsciousness happens at 700 ppm, almost immediate collapse and respiratory paralysis at 1000 ppm, and 5000 ppm and above you are down for the dirtnap if you aren't very promptly removed from the source of exposure and resuscitated.

It is nothing to mess around with (those poison gas signs are there for a reason around oil well sites), but it won't kill you as soon as you smell it unless you blundered into a high concentration (a twentieth to a half a percent or more in air).

Yes, it is always dark the night before the biggest earthquakes. It’s that kind of 100% correlation.

That and a burrito festival....

Nat gas is odorless. They put that stuff in it to make it stink. Otherwise houses would be blowing up all over the place.

bboop wrote: " 'Historically, hydrogen sulphide gas has often been forced out of the ground in areas because of the pressure created by an immanent large earthquake.'

My husband is a geologist. He does not buy the 'this happens before an EQ' because if it were true, they'd have been predicting earthquakes for a long time now, and they would use the early warnings to set off alarms for the citizens.

He thinks it has to do with muggy air + high heat + complex sewer systems with air captured in them due to the storms and humidity."

Bboop, please thank your husband for me. He's a genius and I agree with him. :)

Here's what I posted.

Unfortunately there still is no scientifically proven predictor of an impending earthquake. The foul odors today here in the Los Angeles area cannot be scientifically or reasonably assumed to indicate an impending major earthquake. However that does not rule out a major earthquake occurring soon.

This is absolutely true. There could be a thousand years of a million people noticing similiar pre-earthquake events, and according to modern science, if those observations were not standardized and correlated into a reproduceable model and peer-reviewed, there would still not be a "scientifically proven predictor of an impending earthquake."

On the other hand, "in 1931 the mathematician and logician Kurt Godel proved that within a formal system questions exist that are neither provable nor disprovable on the basis of the axioms that define the system. This is known as Godel's Undecidability Theorem. He also showed that in a sufficiently rich formal system in which decidability of all questions is required, there will be contradictory statements. This is known as his Incompleteness Theorem. (http://www.exploratorium.edu/complexity/CompLexicon/godel.html)

In other words, Godel scientifically and mathematically proved that there are truths which science can never prove, and untruths which science can never disprove, and therefor science can NEVER be the last word on the truth.

So I'd say, when a hundred square miles smells like sulfer, and the wind is blowing the wrong direction, and th media keeps talking about dead fish instead of sulfur, and people report (in a non-peer reviewed manner) the same smell numerous times throughout history before large earthquakes, well, that's what the government is FOR - to tell you whether to worry. And look - the government is telling you not to worry.

So that's that.

Having studied the science, as well as having lived through two major earthquakes plus countless large earthquakes where never a strange odor was detected prior to the earthquakes, I think I'll stick with scientific facts and leave the backyard fence, scare mongering to others more proficient in same.

Vermont Lt wrote: "Yes, it is always dark the night before the biggest earthquakes. It's that kind of 100% correlation."

Now hold a second. Are you trying to say that it gets dark at night and that it's light during the day?
Next thing I suppose you'll try to say that the Sun rises in the East.

;)

Unfortunately there still is no scientifically proven predictor of an impending earthquake. The foul odors today here in the Los Angeles area cannot be scientifically or reasonably assumed to indicate an impending major earthquake. However that does not rule out a major earthquake occurring soon.

If a major earthquake were to occur in the area in the next 48 hours, it's still unlikely that the bad odor could in retrospect be proven to have been a predictive indicator. Prior to the 1994 Northridge earthquake, the 1989 Loma Prieta earthquake in San Francisco and the 1971 Sylmar (Los Angeles) earthquake, there were no unusual odors noticed or reported prior to any of the earthquakes.

Seismologists and now local authorities remind us that colorless, odorless and carcinogenic radon gas is released prior to and at the time of a fault-line rupture. Some believe that radon emission may account for unusual behavior noticed in small animals prior to some earthquakes.

Sulfuric odors have been noticed as recently as March 2012 near the Madrid Fault Line, which some bloggers believed meant an impending major earthquake. A major earthquake on the Madrid Fault Line still has not happened, however.

In 2011 some San Diego residents noticed strong chemical odors near a beach and feared a major earthquake which also has not happened.

Venezuelan residents in August this year noticed a strong odor of sulfur hours prior to the tragic explosion at a local refinery. That explosion has been reported to have been caused by a gas leak.

Survivors: Strong gas odor before Venezuela blast

On Line: 26 August 2012 15:54
In Print: Monday 27 August 2012

PUNTO FIJO, Venezuela (AP) — Venezuelans who live next to the country's biggest oil refinery said they smelled a strong odor of sulfur hours before a gas leak ignited in an explosion that killed at least 39 people and injured more than 80.

The Amuay refinery was still burning on Sunday more than a day after the blast, sending up a thick column of black smoke.

Residents in a neighborhood next to the refinery said that starting about 7 p.m. on Friday they noticed the unusually strong odor. Government officials say the blast occurred about 1:15 a.m. on Saturday when the gas leak created a cloud that ignited.

The cause of the disaster is under investigation.

Gabriela Nunez, a housewife who lives near the refinery, said she noticed the gas odor on Friday night, and then hours later came the shock wave...

End of excerpt. Story continues here: Survivors: Strong gas odor before Venezuela blast

Below describes a little of what Caltech, U.C. Berkeley and the USGS have been working on in order to predict earthquakes and create an early warning system.

A CISN early warning test system caught the M 5.4 Alum Rock earthquake of 2007. This map shows the distribution of ground shaking intensity predicted using the first few seconds of data recorded by seismometers near the epicenter in San Jose. The data used to generate this map was available a few seconds before the shaking was felt in San Francisco.

An earthquake early warning system can provide a few seconds to tens of seconds warning prior to ground shaking during an earthquake. The warning messages can be used to reduce damage, costs and casualties in an earthquake. Earthquake early warning systems are currently operating in Mexico, Taiwan and Japan, but not in the United States. In California, the California Integrated Seismic Network (CISN) is testing an early warning system, using its real-time operations.

How does Earthquake Early Warning work?

The objective of earthquake early warning is to rapidly detect the initiation of an earthquake, estimate the level of ground shaking to be expected, and issue a warning before significant ground shaking starts. This can be done by detecting the first energy to radiate from an earthquake, the P-wave energy, which rarely causes damage. Using P-wave information, we first estimate the location and the magnitude of the earthquake. We use this to estimate the anticipated ground shaking across the region to be affected. The method can provide warning before the S-wave, which brings the strong shaking that usually causes most of the damage, arrives.

Feasibility studies of earthquake early warning methods in California have shown that the warning time would range from a few seconds to a few tens of seconds, depending on the distance to the epicenter of the

Earthquake Early Warning

Late in 2007, MHDP participated in discussion with Caltech, U.C. Berkeley, and the USGS to create an Earthquake Early Warning System. As contributors and end-users have considered the results of the ShakeOut Scenario, the discussion about earthquake early warning has been re-engaged, in examining how it might mitigate injury, property damage, and the loss of life in the ShakeOut earthquake.

Currently, work is being done in partnership with the California Integrated Seismic Network (CISN) to develop the tools and algorithms to provide a warning that an earthquake is underway and strong shaking will reach you based on your distance from the fault rupture...

End of excerpt. Article continues here: Earthquake Early Warning

Large amount of real-time information on this at dutchsinse.com. Dutch has been reporting on this a lot lately. Seems it may be connected with San Onofre nuclear plant as well.