Horses give city wrong kind of air

Charleston, S.C. -- The drought plaguing Southern states has some people in a historic South Carolina city crying foul as equine waste smells have risen again.

The long, dry summer has left people strolling along the quaint downtown streets of Charleston wrinkling their noses because the by-product of carriage tours -- horse droppings -- fills the air with a less-than-quaint odor, the Charleston Post and Courier reported Thursday.

"It's a bad smell," says Beth Friendly, who sells perfumes in the Market area. "It's giving me a headache."

Rob Clark, Charleston Equine Sanitation manager, says the weather, specifically the lack of rain, is the main culprit for extending the smells of summer into fall. But there's another smelly source as well -- the porous asphalt that soaks up the odors then squeezes them out over and over.

"If you stopped running horse tours tomorrow, you could still smell it next August," Clark said. "All we can do is disinfect it and clean it up. But nothing we can do is better than a good rain."

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