Heat Advisory by Alan H. Lockwood

Author:Alan H. Lockwood [Lockwood, Alan H.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: MIT Press
Published: 2016-08-05T00:00:00+00:00

7

Air Pollution, Air Quality, and Climate Change

We need to know more about the total environment ... only by reorganizing our Federal efforts can we develop that knowledge, and effectively ensure the protection, development and enhancement of the total environment itself.

—Richard Nixon, message to Congress establishing the EPA, July 9, 1970

After World War II, Donora, Pennsylvania, was a prosperous town of about fourteen thousand inhabitants located on a bend of the Monongahela River. There were many well-paying jobs in the town’s major industry, a huge complex consisting of open hearth and blast furnaces at one end and a zinc works at the other. Coal was plentiful in Pennsylvania. Coal and iron ore went in one end of the linear array of factories, and galvanized wire, nails, and other products emerged from the other end. Executives lived in plush homes on the hillside that overlooked the zinc works. Others lived in Cement Town, at the other end of the city that bristled with smoke stacks, viewed as a sign of prosperity. Nobody paid much attention to the fact that virtually all of the plants on both sides of the river had died.

Things changed dramatically and suddenly on Thursday, October 28, 1948, when a temperature inversion trapped the gases and particulates emitted by the mill. The smog was so dense that residents walking down the street could no longer see the buildings that were familiar landmarks. Then, people began to become sick and die.

Firefighters struggled to bring oxygen tanks to the afflicted. The Board of Health set up an emergency aid station and temporary morgue in the community center. The mill management refused to believe that the pollutants spewing from the factory were responsible for the crisis. After all, they said, the mill was doing what it had been doing for thirty years.

The exact death toll will probably never be known with certainty, but at least twenty-one died and hundreds were sickened. Investigations that followed linked the disaster to the oxides of sulfur, fluorine, and other unchecked emissions from the zinc works and the rest of the factory complex.

Now, if you walk down McKean Avenue past abandoned stores, it is hard to find traces of the mill. However, at the corner of McKean and Sixth Street, you will find one of the few painted storefronts: the Donora Smog Museum, located in what used to be a Chinese restaurant (http://bit.ly/1MARO0V, accessed September 28, 2015). On a lucky day, you will meet Brian Charlton, one of the town’s schoolteachers and the museum’s curator. He will tell you about the killer smog, the subsequent investigations, and how it all led to the town’s new slogan, “Clean Air Started Here.” Or he may regale you with tales of Stan “the Man” Musial, who was from Donora and whose artifacts occupy a share of the museum.

The Donora disaster was precipitated by a weather event (the formation of an inversion layer)—not climate change—and by uncontrolled emissions from the Donora mills. Its importance lies far beyond the toll on the

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