A putrid, unidentified smell is torturing Oakland commuters

If you commute from Oakland to San Francisco each morning, chances are you’ve smelled it. 

It sort of smells like gasoline, or the ancient layer of dust that gets burned off the old, outdated heater that your landlord never bothered to replace. Some Reddit users said the odor reminded them of a “rotting corpse,” while others complained it smelled like chemicals, or, even more ominously, corn nuts. 

“There was a terrible smell by the Oakland airport this morning as well,” another user chimed in. “It smelled like someone ate a bunch of cheese, then threw it up on a hot griddle.”

According to the internet, this mysterious stench has been torturing Bay Area commuters for months now — and we’re not the only ones who are subjected to it. 

BART staff members have noticed the odor too, James Allison, a BART spokesperson, told SFGATE over email. Though it’s inconsistent, the smell reeks faintly of petroleum, employees have said. It might be caused by trains braking through the tunnel connecting West Oakland and Lake Merritt, Allison said, but it’s also possible that it’s not related to BART at all. SF Standard first reported on the stench in December.  

A historic industrial hub, Oakland is home to a number of sewage and recycling plants, and unfortunately, it’s been known to produce some less-than-savory smells that waft through the Bay Area community.   

For instance, Schnitzer Steel, a recycling plant near the Port of Oakland, caught on fire in August and produced a noxious haze that could be smelled from miles away, and the East Bay Municipal Utility District has an entire page dedicated to reporting funky odors that emanate from its own local facility.   

Normally, EBMUD dumps high-strength bleach into its wastewater to break down its uh, compounds, sometimes resulting in a “rotten egg” smell, its website says. Over the course of nearly 20 years, it spent tens of millions of dollars on reining in the awful stench, and it’s still continuing to refine its strategy (Andrea Pook, an EBMUD press representative, told SFGATE that the agency isn’t familiar with the ongoing mystery plaguing BART).

Luckily, even though it literally smells like death, Allison confirmed that the odor at Oakland BART isn’t dangerous. Regardless, Bay Area Reddit users are convinced that it’s about to give real estate agents some terrible ideas for neighborhood rebranding campaigns. 

“You must be in the Dowisetrepla* district,” one user wrote in another post complaining about a “putrid” smell in a similar area of Oakland, referencing a joke from the TV show “How I Met Your Mother” about a neighborhood “downwind of the sewage treatment plant.”

This story has been updated.