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1948 Donora smog

January 01, 1970

The 1948 Donora smog killed 20 people and caused respiratory problems for 6,000 of the 14,000 people living in Donora, Pennsylvania,[2] a mill town on the Monongahela River 24 miles (39 km) southeast of Pittsburgh. The event is commemorated by the Donora Smog Museum.

1948 Donora smog
Location of Donora in Pennsylvania
Coordinates40°10′34″N 79°51′20″W / 40.17624°N 79.85547°W / 40.17624; -79.85547
PHMC dedicatedOctober 28, 1995[1]

Sixty years later, the incident was described by The New York Times as "one of the worst air pollution disasters in the nation's history."[3] Even 10 years after the incident, mortality rates in Donora were significantly higher than those in other communities nearby.[4]

Incident edit

Hydrogen fluoride and sulfur dioxide emissions from U.S. Steel's Donora Zinc Works and its American Steel & Wire plant were frequent occurrences in Donora. What made the 1948 event more severe was a temperature inversion, a situation in which warmer air aloft traps pollution in a layer of colder air near the surface. The pollutants in the air mixed with fog to form a thick, yellowish, acrid smog that hung over Donora for five days. The sulfuric acid, nitrogen dioxide, fluorine, and other poisonous gases that usually dispersed into the atmosphere were caught in the inversion and accumulated until rain ended the weather pattern.[3]

The fog started building up in Donora on Wednesday, October 27, 1948. By the following day it was causing coughing and other signs of respiratory distress for many residents of the community in the Monongahela River valley. Many of the illnesses and deaths were initially attributed to asthma. The smog continued until it rained on Sunday, October 31, by which time 20 residents of Donora had died and approximately one third to one half of the town's population of 14,000 residents had been sickened. Another 50 residents died of respiratory causes within a month after the incident; notable among the fatalities was Lukasz Musial, the father of future baseball Hall of Famer and the 1948 National League MVP Stan Musial.

Two of the heroes to emerge during the four-day smog were Chief John Volk of the Donora Fire Department and his assistant Russell Davis. Volk and Davis responded to calls from Friday night, the 29th until Sunday night, the 31st, depleting their supply of 800 cubic feet (23 m3) of oxygen, borrowing more from all nearby municipalities, including McKeesport, Monessen, and Charleroi. "I didn’t take any myself. What I did every time I came back to the station was have a little shot of whiskey."

The eight doctors in the town, who belonged to the Donora Medical Association, made house calls much like the firefighters during the period of intense smog, often visiting the houses of patients who were treated by the other doctors in town. This was a result of patients calling every doctor in town in the hope of getting treatment faster. It was not until mid-day Saturday, the 30th, that Mrs. Cora Vernon, executive director of the American Red Cross, had it set up so that all calls going to the doctors’ offices would be switched to the emergency center being established in the town hall. The smog was so intense that driving was nearly abandoned; those who chose to continue driving took risks. “I drove on the left side of the street with my head out the window. Steering by scraping the curb.” recalled Davis.

It was not until Sunday morning, the 31st, that a meeting occurred between the operators of the plants and the town officials. August Z. Chambon, the burgess (mayor) of Donora, requested the plants temporarily cease operations. The superintendent of the plants, L.J. Westhaver, said the plants had already begun shutting down operation at around 6:00 that morning. With the rain alleviating the smog, the plants resumed normal operation the following morning.

Researchers analyzing the event have focused likely blame on pollutants from the zinc plant, whose emissions had killed almost all vegetation within a half-mile radius of the plant.[3] Dr. Devra L. Davis, director of the Center for Environmental Oncology at the University of Pittsburgh Cancer Institute, has pointed to autopsy results showing fluorine levels in victims in the lethal range, as much as 20 times higher than normal. Fluorine gas generated in the zinc smelting process became trapped by the stagnant air and was the primary cause of the deaths.[4] Further research was conducted by Mary Amdur about the effects of the smog; she was pressured to withdraw publication of these results but refused to be bowed.[5]

Aftermath edit

Preliminary results of a study performed by Clarence A. Mills of the University of Cincinnati and released in December 1948 showed that thousands more Donora residents could have been killed if the smog had lasted any longer than it had.[6]

Lawsuits were filed against U.S. Steel, which never acknowledged responsibility for the incident, calling it "an act of God".[3] While the steel company did not accept blame, it reached a settlement in 1951 in which it paid about $235,000, which was stretched over the 80 victims who had participated in the lawsuit, leaving them little after legal expenses were factored in. Representatives of American Steel and Wire settled the more than $4.6 million claimed in 130 damage suits at about 5% of what had been sought, noting that the company was prepared to show at trial that the smog had been caused by a "freak weather condition" that trapped over Donora "all of the smog coming from the homes, railroads, the steamboats, and the exhaust from automobiles, as well as the effluents from its plants."[4][7] U.S. Steel closed both plants by 1966.[3]

By 1949, a year after the disaster, the total value of the predominantly residential property in Donora had declined by nearly 10%.[7]

The Donora Smog was one of the incidents where Americans recognized that exposure to large amounts of pollution in a short period of time can result in injuries and fatalities. The event is often credited for helping to trigger the clean-air movement in the United States, whose crowning achievement was the Clean Air Act of 1963, which required the United States Environmental Protection Agency to develop and enforce regulations to protect the general public from exposure to hazardous airborne contaminants.[3]

The incident was little spoken of in Donora until a historical marker was placed in the town in 1998, to commemorate the 50th anniversary of the incident. The 60th anniversary, in 2008, was commemorated with memorials for the families of the victims and other educational programs. The Donora Smog Museum was opened on October 20, 2008, located in an old storefront at 595 McKean Avenue near Sixth Street, with the slogan "Clean Air Started Here". Fewer than 6,000 people still live in Donora.[3]

Media coverage and influence edit

The Donora event led to the first large-scale epidemiological investigation of an environmental health disaster in the United States.[8]

An account of the smog was published in 1950 by the noted medical writer Berton Roueché in The New Yorker under the title "The Fog".[9] Together with another article, "A Pig From Jersey" (about a mass-case of foodborne illness), this article won him the 1950 Albert Lasker Medical Journalism Award.[10] "The Fog" was later included in his celebrated collection of short stories Eleven Blue Men.[11] Devra Davis' 2002 novel When Smoke Ran Like Water starts with the Donora Smog.

The 2009 novel Don't Kill the Messenger by Joel Pierson features a fictional town, Wyandotte, Pennsylvania, which became a ghost town after a smog incident, based on the Donora Smog.[12]

In 2023 Andy McPhee's book, Donora Death Fog: Clean Air and the Tragedy of a Pennsylvania Mill Town, was published by the University of Pittsburgh Press. [13]

An hour-long documentary, Rumor of Blue Sky, produced by Andrew Maietta and Janet Whitney, aired on WQED TV in April 2009. The film features archival images and interviews with survivors of the environmental tragedy.

The Donora smog incident was mentioned in Netflix's The Crown in 2016, when it depicted a similar incident in London in 1952.

The Weather Channel produced an episode of When Weather Changed History on the Donora smog incident. The incident would be revisited in a later Weather Channel series, Weather That Changed The World.

In 1995, the Pennsylvania Historical and Museum Commission installed a historical marker noting the historic importance of the event.[1]

See also edit

References edit

  1. ^ a b "Donora Smog". Historical Marker Database. Pennsylvania Historical & Museum Commission. Archived from the original on December 7, 2013. Retrieved December 9, 2013.
  2. ^ John Bachmann, David Calkins, Margo Oge. “Cleaning the Air We Breathe: A Half Century of Progress.” EPA Alumni Association. September 2017. Page 9.
  3. ^ a b c d e f g Hamill, Sean D. (November 1, 2008). "Unveiling a Museum, a Pennsylvania Town Remembers the Smog That Killed 20". The New York Times. Retrieved November 2, 2008.
  4. ^ a b c Hopey, Don. "Museum remembers Donora's deadly 1948 smog", Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, October 21, 2008. Accessed November 2, 2008.
  5. ^ Musil, Robert, K. (2014). "2. Don't Harm the People: Ellen Swallow Richards, Dr. Alice Hamilton, and their heirs take on polluting industries". Rachel Carson and Her Sisters: Extraordinary Women Who Have Shaped America's Environment. Rutgers University Press. ISBN 978-0-8135-7176-8. Retrieved 4 January 2016.{{cite book}}: CS1 maint: multiple names: authors list (link)
  6. ^ via Associated Press. "DONORA SMOG HELD NEAR CATASTROPHE; Expert Asserts Slightly Higher Concentration Would Have Depopulated Community", The New York Times, December 25, 1948. Accessed November 2, 2008.
  7. ^ a b Staff. "Steel Company Pays $235,000 to Settle $4,643,000 in Donora Smog Death Suits", The New York Times, April 18, 1951. Accessed November 2, 2008.
  8. ^ Jacobs, Elizabeth T.; Burgess, Jefferey L.; Abbott, Mark B. (April 2018). "The Donora Smog Revisited: 70 Years After the Event That Inspired the Clean Air Act". American Journal of Public Health. 108 (Suppl 2): S85–S88. doi:10.2105/AJPH.2017.304219. PMC 5922205. PMID 29698099.
  9. ^ Berton Roueché (September 30, 1950). "The Fog". The New Yorker. Retrieved January 23, 2011.
  10. ^ "Prior Awards". Lasker Foundation. Retrieved January 23, 2011.
  11. ^ Dorothy J. Comins (1955). "Eleven Blue Men, and Other Narratives of Medical Detection". Bulletin of the Medical Library Association. 43 (1): 171–172. PMC 199837.
  12. ^ Pierson, Joel. Don't Kill The Messenger: A Novel. iUniverse.com, 2009.
  13. ^ McPhee, Andy (2023). Donora Death Fog: Clean Air and the Tragedy of a Pennsylvania Mill Town. University of Pittsburgh Press. doi:10.2307/jj.890689. ISBN 9780822966715.

Sources edit

Further reading edit

  • Bryson, Chris (Fall 1998). "A Secret History of America's Worst Air Pollution Disaster". Earth Island Journal. 13.
  • Davis, Devra (2002). When Smoke Ran Like Water: Tales of Environmental Deception and the Battle Against Pollution. New York: Basic Books. ISBN 0-465-01521-2.
  • Jacobs, Elizabeth T., Jefferey L. Burgess, and Mark B. Abbott. "The Donora smog revisited: 70 years after the event that inspired the clean air act." American journal of public health 108.S2 (2018): S85-S88. online
  • McPhee, Andy. Donora Death Fog: Clean Air and the Tragedy of a Pennsylvania Mill Town (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2023)
  • Snyder, Lynne Page. "“The death-dealing smog over Donora, Pennsylvania”: industrial air pollution, public health policy, and the politics of expertise, 1948–1949." Environmental History Review 18.1 (1994): 117-139.

January 01, 1970
1948, donora, smog, killed, people, caused, respiratory, problems, people, living, donora, pennsylvania, mill, town, monongahela, river, miles, southeast, pittsburgh, event, commemorated, donora, smog, museum, pennsylvania, historical, markerlocation, donora, . The 1948 Donora smog killed 20 people and caused respiratory problems for 6 000 of the 14 000 people living in Donora Pennsylvania 2 a mill town on the Monongahela River 24 miles 39 km southeast of Pittsburgh The event is commemorated by the Donora Smog Museum 1948 Donora smogPennsylvania Historical MarkerLocation of Donora in PennsylvaniaCoordinates40 10 34 N 79 51 20 W 40 17624 N 79 85547 W 40 17624 79 85547PHMC dedicatedOctober 28 1995 1 Sixty years later the incident was described by The New York Times as one of the worst air pollution disasters in the nation s history 3 Even 10 years after the incident mortality rates in Donora were significantly higher than those in other communities nearby 4 Contents 1 Incident 2 Aftermath 3 Media coverage and influence 4 See also 5 References 6 Sources 7 Further readingIncident editHydrogen fluoride and sulfur dioxide emissions from U S Steel s Donora Zinc Works and its American Steel amp Wire plant were frequent occurrences in Donora What made the 1948 event more severe was a temperature inversion a situation in which warmer air aloft traps pollution in a layer of colder air near the surface The pollutants in the air mixed with fog to form a thick yellowish acrid smog that hung over Donora for five days The sulfuric acid nitrogen dioxide fluorine and other poisonous gases that usually dispersed into the atmosphere were caught in the inversion and accumulated until rain ended the weather pattern 3 The fog started building up in Donora on Wednesday October 27 1948 By the following day it was causing coughing and other signs of respiratory distress for many residents of the community in the Monongahela River valley Many of the illnesses and deaths were initially attributed to asthma The smog continued until it rained on Sunday October 31 by which time 20 residents of Donora had died and approximately one third to one half of the town s population of 14 000 residents had been sickened Another 50 residents died of respiratory causes within a month after the incident notable among the fatalities was Lukasz Musial the father of future baseball Hall of Famer and the 1948 National League MVP Stan Musial Two of the heroes to emerge during the four day smog were Chief John Volk of the Donora Fire Department and his assistant Russell Davis Volk and Davis responded to calls from Friday night the 29th until Sunday night the 31st depleting their supply of 800 cubic feet 23 m3 of oxygen borrowing more from all nearby municipalities including McKeesport Monessen and Charleroi I didn t take any myself What I did every time I came back to the station was have a little shot of whiskey The eight doctors in the town who belonged to the Donora Medical Association made house calls much like the firefighters during the period of intense smog often visiting the houses of patients who were treated by the other doctors in town This was a result of patients calling every doctor in town in the hope of getting treatment faster It was not until mid day Saturday the 30th that Mrs Cora Vernon executive director of the American Red Cross had it set up so that all calls going to the doctors offices would be switched to the emergency center being established in the town hall The smog was so intense that driving was nearly abandoned those who chose to continue driving took risks I drove on the left side of the street with my head out the window Steering by scraping the curb recalled Davis It was not until Sunday morning the 31st that a meeting occurred between the operators of the plants and the town officials August Z Chambon the burgess mayor of Donora requested the plants temporarily cease operations The superintendent of the plants L J Westhaver said the plants had already begun shutting down operation at around 6 00 that morning With the rain alleviating the smog the plants resumed normal operation the following morning Researchers analyzing the event have focused likely blame on pollutants from the zinc plant whose emissions had killed almost all vegetation within a half mile radius of the plant 3 Dr Devra L Davis director of the Center for Environmental Oncology at the University of Pittsburgh Cancer Institute has pointed to autopsy results showing fluorine levels in victims in the lethal range as much as 20 times higher than normal Fluorine gas generated in the zinc smelting process became trapped by the stagnant air and was the primary cause of the deaths 4 Further research was conducted by Mary Amdur about the effects of the smog she was pressured to withdraw publication of these results but refused to be bowed 5 Aftermath editPreliminary results of a study performed by Clarence A Mills of the University of Cincinnati and released in December 1948 showed that thousands more Donora residents could have been killed if the smog had lasted any longer than it had 6 Lawsuits were filed against U S Steel which never acknowledged responsibility for the incident calling it an act of God 3 While the steel company did not accept blame it reached a settlement in 1951 in which it paid about 235 000 which was stretched over the 80 victims who had participated in the lawsuit leaving them little after legal expenses were factored in Representatives of American Steel and Wire settled the more than 4 6 million claimed in 130 damage suits at about 5 of what had been sought noting that the company was prepared to show at trial that the smog had been caused by a freak weather condition that trapped over Donora all of the smog coming from the homes railroads the steamboats and the exhaust from automobiles as well as the effluents from its plants 4 7 U S Steel closed both plants by 1966 3 By 1949 a year after the disaster the total value of the predominantly residential property in Donora had declined by nearly 10 7 The Donora Smog was one of the incidents where Americans recognized that exposure to large amounts of pollution in a short period of time can result in injuries and fatalities The event is often credited for helping to trigger the clean air movement in the United States whose crowning achievement was the Clean Air Act of 1963 which required the United States Environmental Protection Agency to develop and enforce regulations to protect the general public from exposure to hazardous airborne contaminants 3 The incident was little spoken of in Donora until a historical marker was placed in the town in 1998 to commemorate the 50th anniversary of the incident The 60th anniversary in 2008 was commemorated with memorials for the families of the victims and other educational programs The Donora Smog Museum was opened on October 20 2008 located in an old storefront at 595 McKean Avenue near Sixth Street with the slogan Clean Air Started Here Fewer than 6 000 people still live in Donora 3 Media coverage and influence editThe Donora event led to the first large scale epidemiological investigation of an environmental health disaster in the United States 8 An account of the smog was published in 1950 by the noted medical writer Berton Roueche in The New Yorker under the title The Fog 9 Together with another article A Pig From Jersey about a mass case of foodborne illness this article won him the 1950 Albert Lasker Medical Journalism Award 10 The Fog was later included in his celebrated collection of short stories Eleven Blue Men 11 Devra Davis 2002 novel When Smoke Ran Like Water starts with the Donora Smog The 2009 novel Don t Kill the Messenger by Joel Pierson features a fictional town Wyandotte Pennsylvania which became a ghost town after a smog incident based on the Donora Smog 12 In 2023 Andy McPhee s book Donora Death Fog Clean Air and the Tragedy of a Pennsylvania Mill Town was published by the University of Pittsburgh Press 13 An hour long documentary Rumor of Blue Sky produced by Andrew Maietta and Janet Whitney aired on WQED TV in April 2009 The film features archival images and interviews with survivors of the environmental tragedy The Donora smog incident was mentioned in Netflix s The Crown in 2016 when it depicted a similar incident in London in 1952 The Weather Channel produced an episode of When Weather Changed History on the Donora smog incident The incident would be revisited in a later Weather Channel series Weather That Changed The World In 1995 the Pennsylvania Historical and Museum Commission installed a historical marker noting the historic importance of the event 1 See also edit1930 Meuse Valley fog 1939 St Louis smog 2013 Eastern China smog Great Smog of London Pea soup fogReferences edit a b Donora Smog Historical Marker Database Pennsylvania Historical amp Museum Commission Archived from the original on December 7 2013 Retrieved December 9 2013 John Bachmann David Calkins Margo Oge Cleaning the Air We Breathe A Half Century of Progress EPA Alumni Association September 2017 Page 9 a b c d e f g Hamill Sean D November 1 2008 Unveiling a Museum a Pennsylvania Town Remembers the Smog That Killed 20 The New York Times Retrieved November 2 2008 a b c Hopey Don Museum remembers Donora s deadly 1948 smog Pittsburgh Post Gazette October 21 2008 Accessed November 2 2008 Musil Robert K 2014 2 Don t Harm the People Ellen Swallow Richards Dr Alice Hamilton and their heirs take on polluting industries Rachel Carson and Her Sisters Extraordinary Women Who Have Shaped America s Environment Rutgers University Press ISBN 978 0 8135 7176 8 Retrieved 4 January 2016 a href Template Cite book html title Template Cite book cite book a CS1 maint multiple names authors list link via Associated Press DONORA SMOG HELD NEAR CATASTROPHE Expert Asserts Slightly Higher Concentration Would Have Depopulated Community The New York Times December 25 1948 Accessed November 2 2008 a b Staff Steel Company Pays 235 000 to Settle 4 643 000 in Donora Smog Death Suits The New York Times April 18 1951 Accessed November 2 2008 Jacobs Elizabeth T Burgess Jefferey L Abbott Mark B April 2018 The Donora Smog Revisited 70 Years After the Event That Inspired the Clean Air Act American Journal of Public Health 108 Suppl 2 S85 S88 doi 10 2105 AJPH 2017 304219 PMC 5922205 PMID 29698099 Berton Roueche September 30 1950 The Fog The New Yorker Retrieved January 23 2011 Prior Awards Lasker Foundation Retrieved January 23 2011 Dorothy J Comins 1955 Eleven Blue Men and Other Narratives of Medical Detection Bulletin of the Medical Library Association 43 1 171 172 PMC 199837 Pierson Joel Don t Kill The Messenger A Novel iUniverse com 2009 McPhee Andy 2023 Donora Death Fog Clean Air and the Tragedy of a Pennsylvania Mill Town University of Pittsburgh Press doi 10 2307 jj 890689 ISBN 9780822966715 Sources editOverview of the 1948 Donora Smog Pennsylvania Department of Environmental Protection Don Hopey 2008 Museum remembers Donora s deadly 1948 smog story by Pittsburgh Post Gazette Retrieved October 21 2008 Weather Channel 2008 When Weather Changed History Killer Smog permanent dead link Retrieved November 6 2008 Further reading editBryson Chris Fall 1998 A Secret History of America s Worst Air Pollution Disaster Earth Island Journal 13 Davis Devra 2002 When Smoke Ran Like Water Tales of Environmental Deception and the Battle Against Pollution New York Basic Books ISBN 0 465 01521 2 Jacobs Elizabeth T Jefferey L Burgess and Mark B Abbott The Donora smog revisited 70 years after the event that inspired the clean air act American journal of public health 108 S2 2018 S85 S88 online McPhee Andy Donora Death Fog Clean Air and the Tragedy of a Pennsylvania Mill Town University of Pittsburgh Press 2023 Snyder Lynne Page The death dealing smog over Donora Pennsylvania industrial air pollution public health policy and the politics of expertise 1948 1949 Environmental History Review 18 1 1994 117 139 Retrieved from https en wikipedia org w index php title 1948 Donora smog amp oldid 1214336806, wikipedia, wiki, book, books, library,

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