Mystery solved! Couple sniffs out smell that drove them from home | News

SALISBURY - Malathion 50.   That was it.  The source of that awful smell. 

It was like natural gas mixed with a dead animal, and maybe a chemical of some sort, and it was so bad that it drove Raymond and Dee Elliot from their Meadowbrook home last Friday.

For days they had plumbers, HVAC workers, restoration experts, all tromping around the fetid atmosphere of their basement...and nobody could figure it out...until Wednesday.

Tyler Weant from Elium Exterminators in Salisbury, he's the one Dee Elliot now calls a "hero," spent two hours in the house, most of it in that basement surrounded by the horrible odor.  And when the time was up, he had concluded that the smell was indeed a chemical, an old plastic bottle of Malathion 50, a product used to kill bugs.

The Elliot's say the bottle was on a small shelf ion the basement where it had sat, undisturbed, for decades.  But the plastic had grown brittle over the years, and last Friday a crack developed in the bottle, sending the chemical running down the wall and onto the floor, where it slowly but insistently, creeped and seeped into everything it touched.

The smell filled the basement and beyond.  A neighbor was the first one to actually catch a whiff.

The experts tried, and failed, to explain it. Raymond and Dee stayed with friends and family, and still will have to wait a couple days for the smell to subside before they can spend the night in their home.

But now they know what they are dealing with, and how to finally make it go away. 

They've gotten rid of the bottle, but now they are using lime on the walls and the floor, every place that the chemical touched.  It may take several treatments, then they'll have to wash, scrub, and repaint the walls and the floor.

On Wednesday night they said it would be worth it.  The Elliots said they are very relieved, and very happy to finally have this malodorous mystery solved.