On October 30, 1948, the citizens of Donora awoke to their fifth straight day of the toxic fog that had settled into their small, western Pennsylvania town. People had little choice of what to do: the fog was so thick that roads were largely impassable and the town essentially came to a standstill. Physicians made house calls to help those having trouble coping with the harmful smog that was invading their lungs, and the fire department scrambled to distribute as much oxygen as possible to those in greatest need of fresh air. Ultimately, the town was powerless against the thick fog that pervaded their entire valley.
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| High Noon in Smoggy Donora |
Meteorologically speaking, the Donora fog was the result of what is termed an “inversion.” Typically, sunlight warms the surface of the earth, heating the air there, which then rises and cools as it reaches the troposphere. This rising and cooling air whisks harmful emissions from factories and cars away into the atmosphere, limiting human exposure. In an inversion, a pocket of warm air sits higher than normal and traps cooler air beneath it, leading to fog and moist air sitting at ground level. Normally, this means nothing more than a little morning fog to make your drive to work mistier and your graveyard visit a little spookier, but in Donora, where the town sat in a valley hemmed in by mountains, the fog stayed for days.
Donora, with a population of 14,000 at the time, was a respectable contributor to Pennsylvania’s rust belt with its two U.S. Steel plants that employed nearly half the town. These factories regularly spewed noxious chemicals into the air, including nitrogen dioxide, sulfuric acid, and even fluorine (fluorine is comparable to chlorine gas in its devastating effect on organic life). These chemicals had a regular effect on the town, but when they were contained by the air inversion in late October, they made a vicious cocktail that proved deadly.
At first, Donorans thought it was just another fog, one that was especially thick and forced people to move about town on foot rather than by car and use flashlights in the daytime to find their way around. But it lingered for a day, and then two days, and then three. Those with respiratory issues like asthma began to choke on the thick cloud and required bottled oxygen to ease their troubled breathing. The fog became so pervasive that even those who were fully healthy began to exhibit symptoms of poisoning. By the fifth day, it’s estimated that around half the town was experiencing at least some medical duress. By this time the townspeople decided the steel plants might have something to do with the noxious fumes, and so they urged the plants to close operations until the fog passed. They complied, but it was too little too late. On the sixth day, a storm blew through town and finally cleared out the fog.
The final death toll for the deadly smog of Donora settled at 20. Sadly, nothing would really happen as a result of the deaths that were undoubtedly caused by the toxic emissions of the nearby plants. U.S. Steel refuted the notion that they were somehow culpable, and finally settled with the residents for $250,000, not for each citizen, but to be spread among the entire town. Experts, upon examining the people and the air of the town, have stated that had the chemicals been present for any longer, the death toll would have been much higher as it would have started to dramatically effect even the healthiest citizens. Even though this didn’t happen, this six-day onslaught is remembered as one of the deadliest air pollution disasters in our nation’s history.
