Latest Article|September 3, 2020|Free
::Making Grown Men Cry Since 1992
5 min read
Steve Finch was riding his bike to work last winter. Wafts of an all-too-familiar smell engulfed him about a block from his office. He felt like he might have to pull over from fear of losing his breakfast.In a city that’s constantly being rebuilt, reorganized and added on to, most Burqueños know the unmistakable, noxious smell of fresh asphalt. Being subjected to the odor of plants pumping out large orders of the stuff is less common. "What they’ll do is make a bunch of asphalt and fill those big silos you see," Finch says. Still fewer have sent their employees home sick with headaches or experienced waves of nausea while riding to work. Yet businesses in the Broadbent Business Park off Menaul and I-25 are intimately acquainted with that smell, which drifts from an asphalt-batching plant about 1,000 feet away. Finch, who owns a business in the area, says on asphalt production days his workers leave early with headaches and his clients complain when they walk through the door. Finch doesn’t want his company named in this story.Twin Mountain, the construction company that built the Big-I and the I-40-Coors interchange, owns the asphalt plant in the northwest quadrant of the Big I area. Finch put up with the stink for years, he says, because he thought Twin Mountain would only be using the property temporarily while the company worked on the freeways. "As this was going on, there were times when I was just hanging out inside or outside my office, and I got overcome by some serious fumes," Finch says. "One day, it can be just horrible depending on which way the wind is blowing. And the next day, it’ll be perfectly fine, like there’s nothing there. It’s hard to catch something like that."