One Dairy Queen location in Calgary, Alberta, Canada recently ran a bizarre (but effective) promotion for its customers. If you could figure out why that Dairy Queen location smelled like rotten eggs, you would receive a free Blizzard per week for an entire year. It doesn’t get much weirder than this.
Since 2015, the Dairy Queen located on Calgary’s 11100 block of 14th Street N.E. has been plagued with an absolutely vile stench that just won’t seem to go away. Owner Sujad Bandali notes that he first noticed the smell on the day of the location’s grand opening.
“It smells like natural gas, it smells like propane, rotten eggs,” Bandali told local news CBC in an August 6th interview. “As soon as you walk in you get a whiff of it then it kind of disappears.”
Bandali said that he first feared it was a gas leak, and called the fire department and the ATCO gas company mere hours before the location opened to the public. “They tested everything and everything seemed fine,” Bandali said.
The Dairy Queen’s property owner got involved and hired experts in an unsuccessful attempt to determine where the odor was coming from. Then, thinking the smell was wafting from the sewers through the drains, Bandali flushed the drainage system several times — yet the stench remained.
Having run out of options and ideas, Bandali put the offer of free ice cream on the table for the sleuth who solved the mystery of the unyielding stink.
This case proved to be challenging, though, as Bandali told CBC that many people can’t smell the odor at all. “It depends on how sensitive the person’s nose is,” he said. “Half the staff can smell it, half of the staff can’t smell it.”
In the days after Bandali posted his Blizzard reward, he received tons of tips and theories (from all over Canada and abroad), although most of them had already been investigated and debunked by the landlord.
But hope was restored when one ATCO serviceman decided to do a “dead check.”
When the ATCO team returned to the scene of the stink on Tuesday, August 7th, one of the technicians suggested they try a dead check, which means all appliances that use natural gas are turned off. If the meter still reads that you’re using gas, there’s probably a leak somewhere.
A dead check was put into motion and soon enough, a tiny gas leak was detected in the ceiling of the stinky Dairy Queen. Case closed.
Mystery stink that plagued Dairy Queen for years finally solved. It was a tiny natural gas leak near the ceiling. Now it no longer smells like rotten eggs. https://t.co/q3LwzASYxj
— CJ Frederick 🇺🇦 (@PoweredbyPoodle) August 10, 2018
“Finally, I proved it to everybody, I was not losing my mind,” Bandali told CBC on August 9th.
Although we didn’t get a shot at trying to break the case, we’re glad Bandali, his staff, and his customers are safer and stench-free (and we hope that ATCO serviceman is enjoying his year’s supply of free Blizzards).
To learn more about gas safety and what to do if you believe you’re at risk, visit the Pacific Gas and Electric Company’s website.
