Six days in September, 1950....

[shance]

"I think most of us have smelled that 'natural gas' smell at some point.

Of course, it isn't the gas we're smelling, it's the chemical methyl mercaptan which is added so that we can detect if gas is leaking.

Now imagine waking up and finding your whole city smells like that, or worse, the city to your immediate north, as those in New Jersey found this morning.

I heard Mayor Bloomberg assure citizens this morning that there does not appear to be any danger. If there was a leak of gas, it disperses so rapidly there is no danger of combustion.

But as I listened, I thought, as I often do when I listen to the news, what if this is not what it seems?

What if this is like the Army's biological warfare test conducted on the citizens of San Francisco in 1950?

As the San Francisco Chronicle reported a couple of years ago:

For six days in late September 1950, a small military vessel near San Francisco sprayed a huge cloud of serratia particles into the air while the weather favored dispersal.

http://realhistoryarchives.blogspot.com/

Then the Army went looking to find out where it landed. Serratia is known for forming bright red colonies when a soil or water sample is streaked on a culture medium -- a property that made it ideal for the bio-warfare experiment.

Army tests showed that the bacterial cloud had exposed hundreds of thousands of people in a broad swath of Bay Area communities including Sausalito, Albany, Berkeley, Oakland, San Leandro, San Francisco, Daly City and Colma, according to reports that later were declassified.

Soon after the spraying, 11 people came down with hard-to-treat infections at the old Stanford University Hospital in San Francisco. By November, one man had died. Edward Nevin, 75, a retired Pacific Gas and Electric Co. worker recovering from a prostate operation, had succumbed to an infection with Serratia marcescens that attacked his heart valves.

The outbreak was so unusual that the Stanford doctors wrote it up for a medical journal. But the medics and Nevin's relatives didn't find out about the Army experiment for nearly 26 years, when a series of secret military experiments came to light.

So I'm thinking, what if this is more than a bizarre 'accident?' While gas was not detected at the city's air monitors, the smell of mercaptan was omnipresent for hours. What if the government added mercapsan to some other substance and sprayed it one way or another in New York City?

The obvious motive that comes to mind is that the government wants to see what might happen were a biological agent to be released in the city. Simple reports of the smell would tell the experimenters all they'd need to know regarding how far the substance spread.

Whatever the case, despite assurances from Mayor Bloomberg that there is nothing to fear and no danger to citizens, Reuters is reporting that 19 people have so far been hospitalized:"


http://realhistoryarchives.blogspot.com/

[don954]

1. I had the exact 1st thought when i heard the set was all over and

the gas pipes were at proper presure...

[shance]

2. About San Francisco?

n/t

[don954]

3. new york

[shance]

5. Gotcha.

n/t

[shance]

6. kick

n/t

[Cleita]

4. I have propane myself and I know the smell. When I smell it

I check all my pilots because for sure one of them is bound to be out letting what could be a lethal gas into my home. I hope he has city utility workers out there trying to trace the source of it.

[shance]

7. kick

n/t