Add The New York Post on Google It was a reel bad smell.
Over 100 tanks of rotten fish sauce are finally being removed from a small Canadian town after stinking up the neighborhood for decades.
The supply of what what’s been described as “the worst rotted fish you ever smelled” was left abandoned in the quaint town of St. Mary’s after the Atlantic Seafood Sauce Company shuttered more than 20 years ago.
Over the next few months, workers will embark on a $1.2 million project to drain roughly 110 tanks, each holding 3,000 gallons of fermented fish sauce.
The stinky sauce will then be mixed with peat moss to absorb the liquid, according to St. Mary’s volunteer mayor, Steve Ryan.
Trucks equipped with giant hoses will then suck up the material and deliver it to a massive pit lined with high-density polyethylene, where the waste will be buried in topsoil.
The dilapidated factory full of ditched fish sauce has wafted an indescribable smell over the town of roughly 300 people in Newfoundland and Labrador.
The liquid kept fermenting as the plant kept turning to ruin, with a blown-off roof and a wall knocked out by a storm in January.
Glenn Sharp, owner of Sharp Management, the company overseeing the task, called the cleanup a “unique job.”
“This is a special waste,” he said. “This does not fall under any of the standard classifications.”
“The worst rotted fish you ever smelled in your lifetime, times 100,” Ryan told The Associated Press.
Ryan even briefly worked at the factory after graduating from high school in 1990, and said the town has been on a “crusade” to urge the provincial government to fund the elaborate cleanup.
“That kind of makes me a little bit mad,” said Ryan. “Every door we came to was just closed in our face. … They forgot about us.”
“It’s a big relief,” he said, adding that the federal government has not contributed to the cost.
The community had to take out a hefty loan of 198,000 Canadian dollars, or $140,973, though the town will get the money back later.
“We’re such a small town, and we were left on our own,” Ryan said. “For so many years nobody had our backs.”
But we “kept fighting and fighting,” he added, “because we knew we were right in what we were fighting for.”
