WARREN, Ohio - For weeks residents in Warren have dealt with a bad smell outside and inside of their homes.

Wednesday night Warren City Council announced the stench is coming from Patriot Water Treatment and how they could be filing a lawsuit against the company.

Residents said they are sick of living with unpleasant scent. 

One resident described it as a raw hamburger smell mixed with the smell of spoiled milk.

The odor permeating the air throughout Warren has caused a big stink.

For days now Amy Fry and her family have been breathing in spouts of a bad smelling air at their Hall Street Home.

She says some days they won't even go outside.

“One day we had all of the windows down and my young son said, ‘Oh my God, Mommy what is that smell?’ I said ‘I don’t know.’ I mean, it really reeked. I mean, it was really bad,” she said.

Patriot Water Treatment takes in waste water from companies and treats it.

Ed Haller, head of Warren's Water Pollution Control, says two companies giving their waste water to Patriot to treat had a chemical in it called dimethyl disulfide, causing the smell.

“So they are discontinuing receiving as far as I understand from those two companies, and now that they understand the issue there, they are looking much more closely at it and they are doing testing within their facility,” Haller said. “But there is still a lot of this chemical in the system, so it may be a little while before we can get it dissipated.”

City Council members were upset it took so long to track down the smell.

They say Patriot Water Treatment was reluctant to give them information about the smell. They’re  now considering a filing a lawsuit against the company.

“We have to make sure that not only does it not happen again, but no possible way that it lasts two, three weeks,” said Warren Councilman Eddie Colbert.