At first people thought it was a gas leak, but the smell was actually the result of a non-toxic chemical leak from a lab inside the Poultry Science Building. It all started around 9 A.M. when an employee in the Poultry Science Building noticed a strong smell coming from one of the labs. She traced it to a bottle of Mercaptan -- a harmless chemical added to natural gas to make it smell. U of A officials say someone left the bottle out overnight. "She did exactly what she's supposed to do. She vented it under one of the hood vents in the lab, of course when it hit the air it then spread," says Steve Voorhies, Manager of Media Relations. Across the street in the Administration building, employees began noticing the smell and evacuated themselves. "I grabbed my purse and I said, 'you know, I'm leaving the building because it smells like natural gas,' and everybody else at the same time had a similar idea so we all wound up coming out here and standing," says Rebecca Mistarz. Arkansas Western Gas and environmental safety officers investigated the leak. An event earlier in the morning added to the confusion. "There had been a gas line broken on the construction project on Maple Hill but that happened about 8:30 A.M. and it had been found, fixed, secured and everything was fine very quickly. So originally they thought oh, here it is the gas line again but that was not the case," Voorhies says. Unfortunately the only way to get rid of the smell is to let the buildings air out.
