PROSPECT-LEFFERTS GARDENS — It's a stinking mystery.
A pervasive smell of gas blanketed the neighborhood Tuesday night, causing more than 100 people in the Crown Heights and Prospect-Lefferts Gardens area to report the odor to National Grid in the after-work hours, the agency said Wednesday.
But when the utility company and FDNY investigated the claims, they could not identify the source, the agency said.
“We had a little over a hundred calls and we responded to every single one of them … and we did not find anything,” said Karen Young, spokeswoman for National Grid. “The odor dissipated.”
The mysterious odor comes rattled nerves in the wake of a a massive blast over the weekend that killed at least two people in Borough Park. The blast was initially believed to have been caused by a gas leak, but officials now believe it was set off by chemicals from a beauty salon, sources said.
In the spring, a deadly gas leak led to a blast on the Lower East Side, and last year, a gas leak led to a blast in Harlem.
Lots of locals took to social media Tuesday night to figure out where the smell was coming from, posting about the feared gas leak from miles apart.
A resident of Classon Avenue near Bergen Street in northern Crown Heights posted about the odor to a neighborhood Facebook group around 10:30 p.m. — shortly after a Ditmas Park resident reported the issue to the city’s Office of Emergency Management on Twitter.
@NotifyNYC any update on gas smell in Brooklyn? Live in Ditmas Park, @fdny says a lot of people have been calling in.
— midori valdivia (@hellomidori) October 7, 2015Dozens of people in Prospect-Lefferts Gardens smelled it, too, including Cheryl Sealey who was walking her dog along Flatbush Avenue near Hawthorne Street around 7:30 p.m. when she and a friend smelled “a strong, noxious gas odor,” she said and immediately called the fire department.
“Folks were coming out of the laundromat, stores and walking along the street,” in response to the smell, she said in an email.Two business on the avenue — Burger Mexicano and local bar Erv’s on Beekman — were reportedly evacuated Tuesday night, as well, residents said. Calls to both eateries were not immediately returned Wednesday.
In the event that you smell gas, National Grid recommends leaving the area and calling their gas emergency hotline at (718) 643-4050.
