- One minute Ernestine Stange's garage
and driveway were white. The next, they were covered with thousands of
textured, dark brown droppings.
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- The next-door neighbor's gray house --
with its new addition on the back -- and driveway were covered with the
strange blotches, too.
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- Based on the massive number of spots,
the color and the fact that they were on the rooftops, Stange assumed the
droppings that fell last Tuesday in Westland were human feces dumped from
an airplane.
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- She made dozens of phone calls -- to
airport officials, county health officials and the Michigan Department
of Agriculture. On Thursday, an environmental specialist took samples.
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- The conclusion after tests: It's not
human feces, but beyond that, it remains a mystery.
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- Metro Airport spokesman Len Singer said:
"I can't tell you what it was. But I can tell you what it wasn't,
and it wasn't human waste."
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- "I'm worried about getting this
mess cleaned up," Stange said Monday as she looked out her sliding
glass window at her filthy garage. "We've had several jokes about
it. 'I've heard of it hitting the fan, but the garage?' 'You talk about
sitting in a pile of it.' That kind of thing. But I'm really afraid of
disease and everything else. I'm worried about my animals and what might
be in that stuff. I guess if it wasn't my house, I'd also find it funny."
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- Stange's neighbor Mariusz Boguszewski
said he doesn't think the mess is funny, either.
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- "I was just going to let it go as
an angry flock of birds, but my neighbor wants to investigate it. And they've
got my curiosity up," he said Monday before lab tests were completed.
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- Stange said she doubted birds could make
such a mess: "They would've had to have had a convention right above
my house and have everyone go at once."
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- Singer said he would ask lab technicians
to run more tests today.
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- Airport spokesman Mike Conway said that
in the 12 years he's been working for the airport, it's had six or eight
calls from people who thought their homes had been hit by airplane waste.
"And in none of the cases has the lab test ever showed that it was
aircraft waste," he said Monday. "However, that doesn't mean
it couldn't happen."
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- Stange found little comfort in the news
that the material wasn't human feces. "I still need to know what it
is, because it can be a hazard to myself and to my family and to my animals.
This is just too frustrating."
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