Odors Cause Employees to Suspect Something Fishy : Burbank: Fire officials say the foul smell comes from dumpsters at a shrimp processing plant. The company denies it.

Employees in and around a Burbank office building are putting up a stink about a foul smell that has sickened several of them since last May.

“It’s like being locked in a public restroom for days on end,” said Thomas Tunnicliffe, owner of the building at 120 N. Victory Blvd.

“It’s like if you had a fish fry at your home, and you let the remains sit in the sun for three weeks,” an employee said.

What’s worse, no one in the office-industrial neighborhood around Victory Boulevard and Orange Grove Avenue knows exactly where the odor comes from, although they suspect something is fishy.

Burbank Fire Department officials say the odor comes from dumpsters at Seatrade, a shrimp processing firm that moved around the corner early last year. Fire Capt. Rick Mehling said the smell is not toxic and does not pose a health hazard. “The trash just needs to be picked up more often,” he said.

But Seatrade executives do not agree. They said their trash is picked up every morning. They also said fire officials told them in January that the smell was coming from sewer gas, not their plant.

“All these agencies have been out here, and we’ve been given a clean bill of health by everyone,” said Andy Alba, the Seatrade plant manager. “We’re extremely careful. No one has ever been able to find anything wrong here.”

“We’re bending over backwards,” said Cheryl Johnson, operations manager. “We don’t start work until 6:30 at night. We’ve spent over $30,000 trying to keep the smell down. These people who complain are harassing us.”

Mehling conceded that the Fire Department had initially blamed the sewers. But the department discovered on a visit to the plant about two weeks ago that the smell was coming from Seatrade dumpsters.

The Burbank city attorney’s office has launched an investigation to determine whether the smell is a public nuisance, which might cause the firm to be charged with a misdemeanor, punishable by a $500 fine and/or six months in jail.

Alba said Tunnicliffe has declined invitations to inspect the plant. “He’s going after us as if we’re putting toxic substances in the air,” he said. “It’s just a case of a large developer trying to knock off a small business. I don’t know why he’s doing it.”

Tunnicliffe, who has written Seatrade a letter threatening legal action, denied that he has ulterior motives. “That’s all nonsense. This smell is a terrible nuisance, and we want it stopped now,” he said, adding that he has spent more than $10,000 refurbishing his building with air conditioning and vents to try to keep the odor out.

Karyn Escott, production manager at The Network Forty, a music trade magazine headquartered in the building, said she has suffered nausea and a loss of appetite during her late-night shift.

“The later it gets, the worse it gets,” Escott said. “Around 11 p.m., it gets bad, then by 1 a.m, it’s almost unbelievable. We have the fans going, the air conditioning on, the windows open. We spray Lysol around. It doesn’t really help, though.”

Victor Caballero, the magazine’s imaging center manager, said he often gets slight headaches. “You can’t eat when there’s a smell like that around,” he said. “You can taste it all the time.”

Brian S. Burns, vice president and managing editor of The Network Forty, said: “We’re really at the end of our rope. There’s been a high incidence of illness in the office, of people going home sick. We can’t really connect it to the smell, but we think that’s what it is.”

Sometimes major musical stars visit the publication “and we feel real embarrassed,” Burns said. “It just doesn’t speak well for the city of Burbank or for the management of the building.”

Tunnicliffe said he has asked Burbank council members and the Public Works Department to look into ways to stop the odor.

“The city is the real culprit here,” he said. “They need to do something and fast.”