'Smelly Wind' anyone?

[enaid]

Stench from Europe wafts over Britain


A vile stench emanating from the industrial heartlands of Europe has engulfed southern England as freak weather conditions blew pungent continental odours across the Channel on Friday.

The Met Office received hundreds of calls from members of the public complaining about the disgusting smell, which had migrated from the farming and industrial areas of Germany, Belgium and Holland.
The smell even offended nostrils in London "Das stink" or "le pong" even infiltrated BBC television studios through the corporation's air conditioning system.
The gut-wrenching smell was reported in Suffolk, Surrey, Oxfordshire, Berkshire, Kent, Hertfordshire and all across London.
The emergency services and local radio stations received dozens of calls from people demanding to know what had caused the smell, described as a mixture of manure, methane with a hint of metallic industrial waste.
An unusual combination of weather conditions had brought the smell to England, the Met Office said.
And the bad news is that the malodorous products of foreign manufacturing are likely to hang around for a couple more days until the weather changes.
Early suggestions that the French were to blame for the whiff were later dismissed by the Met Office, which used computer technology to trace air currents back to their continental cousins.
"We were talking to our colleagues in the BBC television centre and they said it was coming through the air conditioning into the TV studios," said Helen Chivers, a meteorologist at the Met Office.
Mrs Chivers said that still air over the last couple of days had allowed the smell from agricultural slurry and industrial waste to gather over Northern Europe.
An area of low pressure over the Bay of Biscay combined with an area high pressure over Iceland. The interaction of the two weather systems had produced a strong easterly wind, which had swept the smell to England.
"The wind was quite strong, had it been any slower it would have allowed the smell to dissipate into the atmosphere," Mrs Chivers said.
"It will probably linger for a couple of days as the easterly wind continues. We should get some rain, which will damp it down a bit. But we really need to get a wind from the South West and that isn't going to happen until next week."
Martin Schulz, an atmosphere chemist at the Julich Research Centre near Cologne, pinpointed its origins to the waste products of the Ruhr Valley and the byproducts of the industries in the ports of Antwerp and Rotterdam.
The cocktail also had an essence of European agricultural waste plus the smell coming from burning wood caused by forest clearing in Eastern Europe.
Dr Schulz, who studies European weather pollution systems, said: "This dirt is coming into England from the Ruhr Valley and industrial Belgium and Holland. It is also being mixed with dirt from Eastern Europe."
A spokesman for the Royal Meteorological Institute of Belgium said: "There is a lot of wind coming into England from Belgium."
France's meteorological office, Météo France, took umbrage at the idea that the stench was wafting in Britain's general direction from France. "Since the beginning of the week have we have only had wind coming from the north.
Not only does France have nothing to do with this stench of which you speak, but we have had to suffer the cold weather coming over from your part of the world," said a spokesman.
"Given the wind, the odour is probably coming from the North Sea, Holland perhaps, or it could be a local coastal phenomenon," he added.
Belgians living in coastal towns have also expressed surprise at the possibility a bad "stinken" might have passed them en route to Britain.
Harriet Bruynooghe, landlady of the popular Botteltje pub in Ostend, a popular seaside resort for Britons, was baffled.
"If the smell was crossing the sea we have would noticed. I have not noticed anything and none of my English customers have either," she said.