'Burning wet feathers' and 'death' smell prompts complaints in Bastrop

BASTROP, Texas (KXAN) -- After a rainstorm and north wind, Terrie Lynn Bach braces for the smell that might hit her when she steps out the front door of her house on the northern edge of Bastrop.

“It smells a lot like, I would think, burning wet feathers … and it smells like death,” Bach told KXAN in early November.

It’s a pungent aroma. Sometimes it’s there, sometimes it isn’t, she said. Bach and others have submitted numerous odor complaints over the years to the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality, or TCEQ.