Residents of a charming beachside town in New Jersey say they have been trapped inside their homes as a revolting stench wafts across the neighborhood.
‘We wait all summer to enjoy our home on the water, and you’re literally locked in the house for two weeks,’ Joseph DiGrande told Fox 29 Philadelphia.
‘You can’t go outside. You can’t breathe. You really can’t stay outside for more than 10 minutes,’ he added of life in Osborn Island, which is typically teeming with people enjoying the seaside air on their balconies, riding their bikes or taking walks during the summer.
But as tens of thousands of dead fish crowd the lagoon, the stench is unescapable.
The dead fish are so closely packed together that from an aerial view, it is hard to make out what is crowding the water.
As the winds blow, the smell of the fish wafts through the air – and even gets inside residents’ homes, they said.
‘It’s disgusting, it is the worst smell in my entire life,’ Debbie Wuss told CBS News.
‘I burnt every candle I could possibly find and now I’m in my infusers,’ she said.
Another resident described the constant stench as akin to that of a public bathroom.
Making matters worse, residents say the odor has attracted swarms of seagulls, who have left their mark on the neighborhood.
‘The birds are destroying the tops of houses,’ Bob O’Brien said.
‘They’re going all over the cars, all over your boats.’
The New Jersey Department of Environmental Protection has blamed the massive fish kill on a combination of warm temperatures and poor water quality in the lagoon.
‘Staff determined that poor water quality resulting from warmer temperatures and low dissolved oxygen in the lagoon resulted in the fish mortality in the lagoon,’ a spokesman told CBS.
‘Fish and Wildlife staff determined that this was an isolated event and most of the dead fish will naturally be removed from the lagoon by the tides or by tide flow.’
But residents say this is the second time such a massive fish kill has occurred in the lagoon in just one month, and DiGrande – who has lived in the area since 2019 – said it has been happening two to three times a year for the past three years.
At times, he said, crews have come to vacuum up the dead fish.
But so far, the Department of Environmental Protection has not done anything this time to help residents get back to their seaside lifestyle as health officials warn them not to swim in any body of water with a large concentration of fish.
‘We’re not getting any help, and it’s not the first time we asked,’ DiGrande claimed.