We’ve received calls that Oyster Creek has an unattractive odor and we agree! It does. The creek is a living ecosystem and when it’s out of balance, it can smell. Consider it very much like the situations we get into when we eat too much food and get – to put it delicately - “backed up.” Normally, the creek has a divine balance of microbes that use and don’t use oxygen. When too many trees and limbs fall into the creek, which happened in Beryl, a magnanimous effort from both microbes begins. Both types of microbes start eating the green debris to restore the creek. The putrid smell of rotten eggs, known as hydrogen sulfide, fills the air as the byproduct of the microbes that don’t use oxygen. In urban areas, like Lake Jackson, where runoff has a lot of nutrients, the smell can be overpowering but it’s only the smell of Nature doing its job to clean decomposing debris from the creek.
