44 tons of rotting meat stink up S.D. town

updated 2:20 p.m. ET Oct. 4, 2009

BRIDGEWATER, S.D. - Behind the freezer doors at a meat plant mysteriously abandoned by its owner, the 44 tons of bison meat managed to hold its own for months, masked by the brutal chill of two South Dakota winters.

Once the power was cut and spring thaw arrived, nature took over. And enough rotting meat to fill a high school gym did exactly what you'd expect: It stank.

It stank at the bank. It smelled at the law office. It reeked at the cafe. Even the jewelry store wasn't immune. Everyone in this tiny town could smell it, everywhere they went. A putrid odor so downright nasty the cleaners sent to mop up the gooey mess of liquefied meat — topped by a blanket of swarming white maggots and buzzed by a legion of flies — gave up after two days.

"You've also got the city offices, the grocery store and the post office. And then you spread out to the local residences," said Mayor Marty Barattini, pointing to each place. "This is a small town. We have just over 600 people, so that stench was enough to overwhelm the entire town. Not just this street."

Fed up with the smell, a brave crew of 18 city and county workers took matters into their own hands this summer and stormed the plant to haul away the putrid meat and take back their town. What came next was the biggest indignity: Three months after the cleanup, the owner still hasn't paid the $11,151 cleanup bill, and owes about $14,085 in unpaid property taxes on top of it.

"We tried to work with that guy," said a dismayed Barattini.

‘This is worse than rotten bodies’
The saga of the smell began in January 2008, when owner Ilan Parente closed Bridgewater Quality Meats and moved the business to Dawson, Minn., as Noah's Ark Processors LLC. He left the boxed kosher bison meat behind, apparently to be sold to a pet food company. It stayed frozen until the electricity was cut off in December for lack of payment.

When the town about 40 miles away from Sioux Falls began to warm in the spring, the smell began to creep out. Some said the scent was like road kill. The mayor said he spent two tours of duty in Vietnam and could not recall smelling anything as bad.

"This is worse than rotten bodies," Barattini said.

The city sent a notice to Parente to remove the caustic cause, and he dispatched two workers who toiled without protective masks, clothing, equipment or access to water or electricity. Defeated by the mess, they quit after two days.

So city and county officials got permission from the South Dakota Animal Industry Board to go inside and finish. It then became clear that the source of the smell was the meat: 88,420 pounds, according to the scale at the Sioux Falls landfill, where the mess was hauled in five dump trucks and three extra-large trash bins.

The crews and a skid loader spent two days removing the meat, which had swollen so much that the shrink-wrapped bags had burst, which caused the stacked boxes to topple. Most crew members wore an oxygen mask and hazardous materials suit because of the strong ammonia odor. Crews cleaned the building with fire hoses and doused it with bleach.

City employee and volunteer firefighter Todd Letcher wore his fire gear. "I don't think anybody should ever do something like that," he said of the job. "That was bad."

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