Carson’s foul odor: Mayor pushes for resolution

Since October, Carson has been plagued by a noxious odor. “I breathe everything you breathe, so it's not that I'm sitting in some Eiffel Tower and I'm not breathing the same air. I'm having the same concerns that you are, and I'm staying right here in the city. … I want a resolution to this,” says Mayor Lula Davis-Holmes. Photo by Shutterstock.

Residents of Carson, a city in South LA, have spent the past several weeks enduring a smell they’ve compared to rotting eggs, vomit, and farts. The smell is coming from the Dominguez Channel, which is full of dead plants and rotting marine animals that are releasing hydrogen sulfide gas. Residents say they’re getting headaches and nausea, and now the city has declared a state of emergency.

“This to me is deferred maintenance and human error. … [This channel] needs to be completely remediated and … that's going to take a long process. That's why this proclamation was issued, so we could hopefully bypass some of these bureaucracies,” says Carson Mayor Lula Davis-Holmes.

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