The Marathon Petroleum Corp. oil refinery in Carson on May 5, 2025. Photo by Rigo Bonilla Jr. for LA Public Press.
If the air outside smells like rotten eggs, call the AQMD.
By Ashley Orona
December 10, 2025
“Gissela Chavez grew up in Huntington Park, where industrial odors from nearby were a constant presence. In high school, she recalls smelling ‘rotting meat’ in the mornings — the stench from rendering plants that process dead animals, fat and bones into animal feed and biofuels…
…Chavez didn’t learn she could report these smells until she started working at Communities for a Better Environment, an organization that advocates for pollution reduction and sustainable communities. She’s now the group’s communications manager.
CBE has led efforts to inform residents how to report odors. The organization has trained youth and adult organizers on how to submit detailed reports and provided support to Spanish speakers. The group encourages residents to collectively report the same odor to pressure the district to hold polluters accountable.
But Chavez said many people in the community still do not know they can report these smells. More work, she said, is needed.
‘If there’s something a community can do, like the perfect watchdogs, the ones who are living on the ground, it’s logging it,’ Chavez said.
Southern California residents can submit complaints about odors, asbestos, dust, gasoline dispensing and other air quality concerns to the district. In 2024, South Coast AQMD received nearly 29,000 odor complaints, double from the 14,000 odor complaints received in 2023, according to South Coast AQMD spokesperson Rainbow Yeung. The district did not provide data on how many complaints resulted in a violation. They also could not say how many odor complaint investigations resulted in identifying a source of the smell because the agency ‘does not track this metric.’”