Dog Bites Man

You know what they say — “whoever smelt it . . .”:

A pungent smell wafted through Staten Island yesterday, alarming hundreds of residents and spurring a daylong but fruitless investigation into its source, fire officials said.

The city began receiving complaints about an odor, possibly of gas odor at 9:40 a.m., and the City Department of Environmental Protection dispatched a hazardous materials crew — 24 members in all — in search of the cause of the stench.

They combed the north and south shores of the island and the Staten Island Expressway, noses on full alert.

“There’s no machinery to detect odor — the only way to go about it is to go out there and smell it for yourself,” said Ian Michaels, a department spokesman who added jokingly that he was assigned to odor duty.

The origin of the odor, though, was an elusive one.