Did hot weather have anything to do with the chemical smell in North County?

OCEANSIDE, Calif. (FOX 5/KUSI) — The smell of salty sea air and sunscreen was overpowered by a wafting chemical-like aroma in North County Friday , according to locals who took to social media to speculate on what it might be.

In the evening hours, the scent was noticed as far north as Oceanside and as far south as Encinitas posts on X, formerly known as Twitter, and Reddit relayed. Descriptive words that were used online included “toxic” and “smoke-like.”

Many pointed to last week’s fire at a San Diego Gas & Electric-operated battery storage facility in Escondido, though officials with SDG&E said in a statement Saturday that the blaze was extinguished by 1 a.m. on Friday.

Alert San Diego, an incident page through the county’s emergency alert system, produced a message to the public at 6 p.m. Friday, informing locals that “the Air Pollution Control District was assessing the situation with support from the County’s Hazardous Incident Response Team.”

As of Sunday, no clear answers have been given as to why North County smelled of chemicals that evening. Only speculations remains.

Also on Friday, a summer heat wave brought high temperatures even to the costal communities. Places like Oceanside and Carlsbad saw highs in the mid-80s to upper 90s, according to National Weather Service.

With this in consideration, did the hot weather have anything to do with that lingering smell in North County? FOX 5 reached out to Alex Tardy, the Warning Coordination Meteorologist for NWS San Diego, to get his opinion on the possibility.

“I’ve heard about these reports and we’ve had inquiries in the same area,” said Tardy. “I live in this area [North County] and did notice a faint smell yesterday [Friday] afternoon.”

When asked if high temperatures could cause some sort of atmospheric event or reaction to make pollutants in the air have a strong smell, the meteorologist said, “I don’t know of anything on the ocean other than a harmful algae bloom that may cause a smell that is not a burnt odor.”

He then provided Friday’s satellite animations, seen in the video below, which he says shows that there was drift to the coast Friday morning from the battery fire that occurred Thursday evening in Escondido.

In another interesting angle, Tardy pointed out that the satellite imagery also shows that “it was clearly evident that smoke from the northern Mexico fire was transported north along the coast during Friday afternoon.”

This fire, which Cal Fire San Diego confirmed was located four miles south of the international border, began around 12:30 p.m. Friday. The impacted area was south of Tecate, Mexico.

“Now whether or not the smoke from Mexico was too far up in the atmosphere is hard to say since typically, wildfire smoke will get pushed higher into the atmosphere away from the source and that makes it much harder to smell,” Tardy explained.

As far the chemical smell, the Mexico fire was reported to be vegetation. Tardy speculated, however, that “it may not have just been vegetation.”

Though no clear answer seems viable, the theories around what may have caused the stench continue to be explored.

FOX 5’s Danielle Dawson contributed to this report.

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