This Day in Tech – 1948: An inversion layer settles over the rust belt town of Donora, Pennsylvania, trapping industrial pollution in the atmosphere. When it clears six days later, 20 people are dead, another 50 are dying and hundreds will live out their days with permanently damaged lungs.
Inversion occurs when the air near the ground is cooler than the air above it, a reversal of normal atmospheric conditions. When that happens, manmade pollutants are trapped, resulting in smog. The physical conditions around Los Angeles, for example, lead to frequent inversion layers over the basin. That, combined with heavy automobile pollution, consistently gives L.A. the worst air quality in the country.
But L.A. has never seen anything quite like that one week in Pennsylvania, in what became known as the Donora air inversion or, more dramatically, the “Donora Death Fog.”
In Donora, an industrial town situated about 20 miles south of Pittsburgh, pollution from the nearby U.S. Steel smelting plants and Donora Zinc Works was the main culprit. Trapped in a temperature inversion, the pollutants blanketed the town during the night of Oct. 26.
The companies connived with the U.S. Public Health Service to cover up the facts of the incident and succeeded in doing so for half a century. Whistle-blowers were silenced; records disappeared. It wasn’t until 1994 that a full accounting of what happened in Donora was finally published.
To Philip Sadtler, an industry consultant sent to evaluate the disaster and who tried without success to expose the corporate cover-up, U.S. Steel was guilty of murder:
“The directors of U.S. Steel should have gone to jail for killing people,” Sadtler said shortly before his death in 1996.
In the end, 40 percent of Donora’s population of 14,000 became ill as a result of the “death fog” and the town joined a growing list of other places hit hard — and harder — by human pollution.
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Sad isn’t it? The U.S. Steel people were wrong and yet didn’t set out to kill people. Conservationist often sound like alarmists until a tragedy like this happens and then suddenly the fatal effects become obvious.
For example, in more mountainous regions inversion is almost a regular way of life. Obviously the steel plant knew it was polluting the air but I’d bet it wasn’t far worse than the “acceptable” norm back in 1948. Negligence is easy mistake to make and one we seem set on making again and again.
well, hi admin adn people nice forum indeed. how’s life? hope it’s introduce branch
This is a perfect example of why big business needs regulation. Money is a powerful thing but towns can also be powerful. This country needs to go back to local control. We have let the federal and state governments gain to much control over local issues.