Breathe easy! Ford's fixed the nasty niff

The foul stench coming from the transit plant has left householders feeling nauseous over the past few months.

Managers at the Swaythling site had earmarked £80,000 to stamp out the smell.

But they believe they have solved the problem after spending £15,000 on improving a factory air filter system.

They have also increased oxygen levels in a cleaning system, where anaerobic bacteria caused the smell, and believe the problem has now been solved.

Nurse Lynda Slade, 40, of Gorselands Road, Bitterne, Southampton, one of the residents affected by the stench, said today: "Hopefully it will be gone for good.

"It was bad enough to wake you from your sleep at night and make you feel sick during the day."

A Ford spokesman said: "Last weekend we began the start of a programme of changes, which we planned one step at a time so we could see how things went.

"Then after that there was a change to a programme to kill off bacteria and there have been no smells that we are aware off since then.

"The council's environmental health did take a couple of calls on Tuesday but found the areas where the complaints came from were downwind of us and not caused at the plant.

"What we now want to do is make sure it doesn't happen again and we have a control system that gives a warning if we are getting close to conditions that caused the problems."

As previously reported in the Daily Echo, the nasty niff, which has been compared to damp washing or decaying vegetation, returned with a vengeance earlier this month.

Reports about the pong came from across the city and from as far afield as Eastleigh and Marchwood.

It originally surfaced in November and was originally dubbed Le Pong following a theory that it came from France.

City council environmental health bosses worked with engineers at the plant, along with a specially trained team from Germany, which tracked the source of the stench to the new cleaning system.