Foul Odor Overwhelms Residents in San Rafael's Spinnaker Point Neighborhood
SAN RAFAEL (KCBS) - Some San Rafael residents are suffering through a stinky summer.
"It's awful," one man who lives in the Spinnaker Point neighborhood near San Rafael Lagoon described the smell. "It goes into the bedrooms, it stays in the house, and it just doesn't go away."
The culprit: an algae bloom, or "green slime" some residents call it, that appeared and multiplied when the lagoon dried up this summer.
Smell Overwhelms Residents in San Rafael's Spinnaker Point Neighborhood
It's hardly the first time the lagoon has dried up; in fact, a pipe used to pump bay water into the lagoon to flush the algae out because it was such an obvious if not altogether stinky problem. But the pipe has broken and according to residents, the landowners whose property includes the lagoon have resisted calls to fix it.
The unhappy neighbors say city officials reluctantly agreed to step in after enough pressure was put on them to provide a solution.
"They've been cleaning out and putting in a new drain area and so they've essentially taken over but they don't want to," one man in the neighborhood explained.
(Copyright 2013 by CBS San Francisco. All Rights Reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed.)
