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SOMBA K'E/YELLOWKNIFE - There was no way Anna Clark could stop to smell the flowers outside her home on July 10.

When she returned from a walk Sunday evening, she was greeted by an overpowering stench that lingered for hours at her Ward Crescent home, across from Tim Hortons on Old Airport Road.

Clark said there have been some sewage-like smells wafting past her home over the years, but this one was especially foul.

"It was sort of like a fishy smell, but if you come from a farm, it's almost like a slough smell," she said. "It's like stagnant water when it's drying. We have had sewage smells around here previously, but not this bad."

Clark said the smell stayed strong until after 11:30 p.m., when she went to bed.

"I closed the windows partially because it was fairly strong," she said.

Bob Carr, who lives on Woolgar Ave., said he actually woke up from a deep sleep two weeks ago because of an overpowering sewage smell.

He suspects the smell is coming from Fiddler's Lagoon on days when the wind is blowing from the west. According to Environment Canada, the wind was blowing four km/h from the southwest at about 8 p.m. on July 10.

Fiddler's Lagoon is the city's sewage treatment pond, located about 10 km west of downtown Yellowknife on Highway 3.

"It was for two nights," said Carr. "One of the nights the smell was so bad it actually woke us up - putrid, like the lagoon. It was almost a smell of ammonia and sewage, and we had to shut our window - this was two o'clock in the morning."

Carr added the horrible stench he endured didn't just come in on a passing breeze but was potent for hours around his house.

"That morning when I got up - I get up around 6:30 a.m. every morning - it was still in the air," he said. "It wasn't just a little breeze."

Carr said it was, in fact, the worst smell he has ever endured in Yellowknife.

"I've never had that kind of an aroma in the city. I've smelled it out by the lagoon but it's so putrid out there you can't stand on the road. I didn't expect that in the town here."

Carr said he is not happy thinking about the next time a westerly wind starts blowing, if indeed the smell is coming from Fiddler's Lagoon.

There is no open sewer work currently taking place in the Frame Lake South or Range Lake areas, according to Mayor Gord Van Tighem.

He also thought Fiddler's Lagoon is the likely source for the smell.

"If the wind is a certain way and the humidity is a certain way and the clouds are a certain way, it certainty will travel that way," said Van Tighem.

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