OSHKOSH, Wis. (WFRV) - For weeks, a "sweet, peculiar" smell has lingered in homes and neighborhoods throughout Oshkosh. City leaders are stunned by what could be causing it, but they are several steps closer to solving it. The reports of the odor first reached city leaders about three weeks ago. Many came from the area of a city-led construction project on Michigan St. between 7th and 8th Ave. Culver’s announces new twist on cheese curds and the return of the CurderBurger “We’ve had staff from multiple divisions, engineering, wastewater, our street division, looking into this to try to see what they could find out," Director of Public Works James Rabe said. "We found that it wasn’t anything related to the construction project, so then we started spreading out, trying to figure out, ‘ok, what could this be?’” Rabe believes the odor is traveling through the sewer system but is not actually the wastewater itself, and testing has cleared it from being a potential cause. He thinks an industrial plant that recently changed operating procedures may be the source of the smell, but we will not know for certain for another week at the earliest. “We’ve had our industrial pretreatment coordinator leading the charge because it really seemed like it was coming from an industry," Rabe said. "And so that individual has a lot of contacts with the industries here in town, especially the ones that need to take steps to reduce whatever is in their waste stream before it enters our system.” Further complicating the situation is the fact that the houses and neighborhoods affected by the odor appear to be completely random, with no pattern or reason identified yet by the ones that are impacted. “It’s been very peculiar because we’ll get one property owner saying, 'Hey, we’re experiencing this,' and he’ll meet with them, and in some cases, yes, we’ll smell it, and then he’ll go to the house next door, and it’s ‘no, we don’t smell anything like that,’" Rabe said. "So it’s been very hit and miss and very difficult to try to track down.” When Ysabella Castro first started smelling the odor in her basement, she thought that she was the only one affected by it. “We have been smelling something actually for the past few weeks in our basement. and we were thinking there were maybe dead animals down there, and we actually called somebody to come look at it, and they just put caps on everything.” “My neighbor was the one that told me that the whole city’s been smelling it, so I felt like finally I wasn’t crazy. But yeah, I’m glad it’s getting fixed.” In addition to having the odor inside her house, Castro notices the smell outside. Yelloh, formerly known as Schwan’s Home Delivery, ceasing operations, 79 Wisconsin workers laid off “It smells just really terrible," she said. "And in the basement too is where I feel like it’s coming from, maybe it’s just outside, I don’t know. I walk my daughter to school almost every single day, and yeah, it’s a gross smell.” The odor is not believed to be harmful. Residents detecting an odor inside or outside their house are asked to email [email protected] to share what they are experiencing.