North Burnaby residents have been complaining of a strong odour over the past couple of days, following an apparent leak at Chevron refinery.
The smell was coming from some naphtha – a blending component of gasoline - which apparently leaked into an impounding basin at the refinery.
Longtime local resident Peter Cech lives close to the refinery and first detected the smell Tuesday evening.
"It was almost like a sweet smell, like nothing I've ever noticed before," Cech said.
But by Wednesday morning, the odour was stronger and more pungent, he added.
"It's hard to describe because there was nothing quite like it. I call this an oily sewer smell, but it had a sharper edge to it," Cech said. "Anytime I smell this kind of stuff, my first thought is: What are my kids breathing? And every time I've asked that question over the past 13 years, I've never had an answer, and when does it become classified as a risk to human health?"
The smell lingered in the air until Thursday night, and on Friday afternoon, Chevron crews were still cleaning up the naphtha.
Naphtha is a liquid hydrocarbon that may be carcinogenic and can cause burning and rashes on skin. However, refinery spokesperson David Schick said there was no risk to human health. Chevron has also checked the nearby air quality monitoring stations, and air quality regulators from Metro Vancouver have visited the site, he added.
Chevron sent information to regulators stating that "the source of the hydrocarbon has been stopped" and that "product recovery has been occurring throughout the night and this morning."
"It's not really a spill, but it's in our impounding basin," Schick said. "We're still working on exactly what happened. It's never something that was released into the public, it was all on our property."
Cleanup crews may have inadvertently worsened the smell.
"We were cleaning it up, and I think the cleanup process dispersed it a little more, so we've changed our cleaning process," Schick said.
Schick also apologized for the odour.
"We regret the smell. We try really hard to make sure these things don't happen," he said. "It's a nuisance odour, it doesn't pose any human health risk, but it doesn't smell very good."