When you smell something funky in Louisville, there’s an app for that

Reporting odors in Louisville is about to become a lot more fun, thanks in part to a duPont Manual High School student.

Like Pittsburgh, Louisville now has an odor app for that.

"The key advantage of reporting through the app versus a direct call is that you are not reporting in isolation," said M. Beatrice Dias, project director at the CREATE Lab at Carnegie Mellon University. That's the lab that developed Smell PGH, which has been helping neighborhoods and health officials track odor problems in Pittsburgh.

You can see your report show up on a map on your phone and others nearby or across the city.

Dias has been working with Louisville's Institute for Healthy Air, Water and Soil on a version of the Smell PGH app that cities across the country, including Louisville, will be able to adapt for their own odor concerns.

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The inspiration came when the Smell PGH was discussed at an institute workshop last year. Smell LOU is already available for iPhones and Android-based smartphones. But it is still being tested to help its developers knock out any technology kinks.

Smell LOU was developed by Andrew Smith, a junior at Manual who also happens to be the son of Mayor Greg Ficher's first innovation chief, Ted Smith.

Andrew Smith said as a freshman he had learned various types of computer coding for websites. "The thing that made me want to do this is I wanted to learn how to make an app for a phone," he said.

This summer Smith has an internship at Carnegie Mellon where he'll continue working on a version that other cities can adapt.

The Pittsburgh app came out of work CREATE Lab did to help connect and empower —with cameras and shared Google spreadsheets — a neighborhood that was having difficulty with pollution from a coke works industrial plant, Dias said. Carnegie Mellon rolled it out in 2016.

This test version of the Smell Lou app lets people rate their stink on a five-point intensity scale, from an OK smell to a "very bad smell." People are asked to describe the odor and any symptoms they may be having.

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The app can be uploaded to smartphones now and the institute welcomes people to begin using it on a trial basis. "We are looking for early users who want to improve health and environmental justice," said Ted Smith.

All reports of serious odors will be relayed to Louisville Metro Air Pollution Control District via Louisville's 311 Metrocall. "We hope that APCD will set up an email address" to receive the reports directly, Smith said.

"We're totally open to it," said Tom Nord, spokesman for air district, while cautioning that district officials have not yet discussed the app with the institute.

When people simply call in odor complaints, as they do now in Louisville, they are not really sure what's going on, Ted Smith said. This app can maybe change that, he added.

With odors sometimes signals of unhealthy emissions, that could be good for people's health, he said.

He said that in Pittsburgh when a group of citizens reports an odor and it is documented on the map and shared with authorities, they are more likely to act.

Eboni Cochran with Rubbertown Emergency Action, which has been pressing the district to be more responsive and transparent with odor complaints, said an odor reporting app would be "awesome. It would be something easy and quick we could do."

James Bruggers: 502-582-4645; jbruggers@courier-journal.com; Twitter: @jbruggers; Support strong local journalism by subscribing today: www.courier-journal.com/jamesb.