the good the bad & the smelly

Well, the good news is, there isn't a dead body under the house. The bad news is, it smells like there is. Since it's gotten warm, the last month plus, we've dealt with the most horrid of smells coming up through our heat vents. Putrid. You could smell it in the house. You could smell it around the house. We've not been able to turn the heat on, or get close to the vents for that matter. Upon investigation, we found that it was these horrid rotting puddles, which we think were probably the remains of rotting animals, but which at this point consisted of large puddles of SLUDGE. We've got a narrow crawl space w/ not enough room to shovel it....Matt's going under, but this is as close as I could get to the opening of the crawl space w/out my gag reflex kicking in. And this is the blessed machine: a tornado vacuum with a 55 gallon drum attached that had 4 exhaust pipes coming out, and an air compressor so big it had to be towed behind the truck (above). So after long last, aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaah... it's gone - amazingly and thankfully gone and we can all breathe deeply.
***This documentation is mostly for Ali & Alysia's benefit because they couldn't imagine what kind of vacuum we could suck up decomposed animal matter with and not ruin in the process. And this would be that.