In his latest novel 11/22/63 Stephen King writes a few times how the protagonist, in Dallas TX, can smell the oil refineries and wells in Midland, TX, not withstanding the fact that the two cities are 325 miles apart and that if he can smell Midland from that distance, then Midland would have to be an uninhabitable cesspool of unimaginable filth.
(Insert Midland TX joke/anecdote here.)
Anyway, reading this brought the question to mind: Is there a record for the longest-distance man made odor ever smelled?
I specify “man made” because I assume (yeah, yeah) that there are natural odors (say sulfur released during a volcano eruption) that will easily beat, distance-wise, the foulest of landfills and the nastiest of industrial facilities. I’ve also heard, likely in exaggeration, that you can smell Cairo before you see it, but I doubt you can smell Cairo from 325 miles away in, say, Tel Aviv, Israel.
I don’t know the answer to the actual question but I have been to Cairo seven times and I have never noticed a distinctive or potent odor that characterizes the metro area as a whole. Once I was there at a particular time of year when the farms were burning some sort of plant waste and you could smell the smoke everywhere you went, but that was not the normal state of things.
The most potent man-made smell I have experienced was from a paper mill in New Hampshire. I could smell it from a couple of miles away but I don’t know the maximum distance at which it was detectable. The locals didn’t seem to appreciate it if I remarked on it.
(I also noticed that if you draw a 325-mile radius circle around Midland you cover nearly all of Texas, most of New Mexico, a corner of Oklahoma, and a wide swath of Mexico. I have no idea what the normal wind patterns are and whether they would favor west-to-east propagation of odors.)
It’s not man-made so much as man-started, but just this past summer there was a huge fire in the boundary waters (the Pagami creek fire, to be precise) on the Minnesota-Ontario border. The ensuing cloud of smoke and ash (and odor) reached me at my home north of Milwaukee, over 500 miles away. My sister in law, 600 miles away in northern Illinois also experienced the smoke and smell.
I think this makes the case that bad smells can travel pretty far.
This. I grew up in Altoona, PA, which is about 30 miles from a town called Roaring Spring, which has a paper mill. If the wind was right, you could smell the hydrogen sulfide from the pulping process at our house. Worse, of course, was whenever we had to drive through or near the town…wow…that was “roll the windows up!” time.
On the outskirts of Olympia there’s a mushroom farm that you can smell from a few miles away. I once had a health inspector come to the restaurant I was working in at the time, smell it, and deduce there must have been a sewage leak on the property. (There was not).
I used to live in a rural area of NZ. There was a natural gas facility maybe 30km south of us. If they had a mercaptan spill, we could smell it if the wind was blowing north.