While the stench of freshman boys typically holds a special place in the halls of De Soto High School, it usually isn’t THIS bad.

That’s because, for once, the putrid stench that many students and faculty have begun to notice venting through DHS is not Axe-masked body odor, it’s something else entirely.

“It smelled awful,” senior Alexa Rosetta said. “When I walked downstairs I almost threw up.”

The custodial staff has now traced the odor back to clogged drains, which gradually filled pipes with stagnant water, resulting in the odor.

“There’s a backed-up drain line going to an old pit that sinks from the old science room drain into in case they’re using chemicals … and that line has backed up,” head custodian Jim Owens said. “Every time water went into it, instead of draining through like it’s supposed to, it was sitting there … and that caused the bad odor.”

Surprisingly, this is not the first time science labs have dealt with this type of situation, as the new science labs also faced drainage issues around the same time last year.

“It [the odor] would happen more on cold days that we’d be able to smell it … and one of the problems is they had piped the chemical shower to vent to the same place the bathrooms did, so when the toilets got flushed more and more throughout the day, the sewer smell from the bathroom was being pumped into the back room,” chemistry teacher Laura Sixta explained.

After the custodial staff capped the drain to ensure the bathrooms were not aerated through the new labs, Sixta and physics teacher Benjamin Cook agreed that the fumes decreased noticeably. However, the smell has now returned, and Sixta now speculates that it is caused by the ventilation of the chemical pit.

“It [the odor] might just be … starting down there in the basement and just getting pulled through the ventilation system and coming up through some of the science rooms,” Sixta said.

Owens wanted to emphasize that the odor students and faculty have smelled was not in fact sewage and posed no danger from inhalation, and that custodial staff expects to have the problem solved within the week.

“Sometimes to fix a problem, you’ve got to dig deeper … until you find out what it is, but there’s no threat or danger, it’s just uncomfortable to live with for a while,” Owens added.