In 1948, a little-remembered environmental disaster occurred in the U.S. that shocked the entire world. It may sound like something from a Steven King horror novel, but it was the real thing. Over 7,000 townspeople fell ill and twenty-six lost their lives. How did this happen? The Donora Death Fog began innocently enough.
On Tuesday, October 26, 1948 the people of Donora, Pennsylvania woke to a blanket of smoke and fog filling their cold streets. Fog was common there when cold Allegheny Mountain air hit the warm water from the Monongahela River that ran in an oxbow bend around the town. Plus the town’s steel mill and zinc works factories ran three solid shifts. They belched out endless pillars of smoke, 24 hours a day, 7 days a week.
People went off to work that Tuesday morning, kids went off to school. But the smog on the morning of October 26th turned out to be … different somehow. As the day wore on, the fog didn’t lift, as it usually did when the sun rose. All the streetlights were still blazing at Noon! Plus the smog became slowly thicker as the day progressed. Townsfolk began to gag and cough, tasting the vile pollution in their mouths.
‘The smog burned your throat, eyes and nose, but we thought it was just another day in Donora.’
Donora Death Fog survivor
Donora is a small U.S. town, about 27 miles south of Pittsburgh. It sits on a tight, horseshoe bend in the Monongahela River, in a deep mountain valley surrounded by steep Appalachian hillsides. It was also the home of the US Steel Zinc Works AND American Steel & Wire Mill. A combined 30 smoke stacks lining the riverfront like a steampunk forest. The two factories employed most of the men in town as laborers. Everyone else, in one way or another supported, or profited off, the two large mills.
Folks in Pennsylvania and Ohio steel towns were used to smog. This was three years after World War II. The GI’s were home and back to work in the mills and factories. But memories of the Great Depression still lingered, and smog, for better or worse, meant prosperity and jobs. Smog meant men were working, bills were being paid, and families were fed. Sure, it was a daily nuisance. It stunted the growth of trees in the valley, mothers washed their curtains as frequently as towels, and it caused hacking coughs amongst the workers. But, that was the price you paid for a part of living the new American Dream, right?
The Donora smog continued to worsen as the week went one, getting thicker and thicker … and thicker for 5 straight days. Most residents hid in their homes except to go out to work. It darkening the valley like an industrial solar eclipse. That didn’t stop the Halloween parade on Friday though, when little kids in costumes walked the streets like real-life specters, coughing and hacking themselves in the foggy gloom. Or the high school football game on Saturday, when no passes were thrown because receivers couldn’t see the ball in the air!
The smog was so thick the fans could barely see the football players on the field.
What the town didn’t know was that a layer of cold autumn air had trapped the two mills’ toxic soup of carbon monoxide, sulfur dioxide and zinc/lead dust on the floor of their mountain valley. It was a rare Atmospheric Inversion that stopped the air from circulating out of the town. The dangerous combination of toxic smoke and weather would yield deadly effects. The thickening, poisonous air began causing uncontrollable hacking coughs and asthma-like symptoms in the townspeople.
Donora’s eight family doctors rushed from house to house and case to case. They ordered those having trouble breathing to abandon the town and head in any direction. This became harder and harder as driving visibility was reduced to just a few feet, even with headlights on. Firefighters carried oxygen tanks through the dark streets to help children and elderly citizens get from place to place. The police were deluged with desperate phone calls for oxygen and masks.
The ambulances could only creep through the smog at 5 mph, with one paramedic walking in front – to check if the road was clear of stuck cars, shouting back to the driver. Driving soon became out of the question. Firefighters were forced to abandon attempts to help their suffering citizens when they were unable to navigate their fire trucks IN MIDDAY!
“The smog was so bad I couldn’t see my own two feet!”
Donora Death Fog survivor
The mayor and town leaders begged the mills’ owners to shut down … but they flatly refused. It would cost too much money to halt production, even for a day. The first deaths began to occur four days in, on Friday. The doctors had made the small Donora Hotel an emergency clinic, because the small local hospital could not handle all the sick, coughing and gasping patients.
By Saturday, the three funeral homes quickly had more corpses than they could handle. The Community Center basement became a spare morgue when the undertakers were overwhelmed. Towns people listening to the local radio station were shocked to learn the toxic smog had now turned lethal! Twenty of their fellow Donorans had died so far! And half the town was getting sicker.
On Sunday morning, October 30th, when church services had to be canceled, the mills’ owners finally ceased operation. It was arguably because most of their workers were out sick and the two large mills were half empty. The next day, on Halloween no less, wind and rain finally came and the smog finally began to dissipate, but not before leaving many Donorians with permanent lung damage.
Twenty-six townspeople would die in all.
All the dead had been 50 or over, some with heart or lung problems. 7,000 people had become violently ill, half the town’s population. While expressing sympathy for the victims, the mill owners disclaimed responsibility! After all, they could not control the weather, could they? Nevertheless, the Donora Death Fog made national news across the U.S.
Over the next months, state and federal investigators descended on small Donora. They set up air monitoring sites and medical clinics in the valley. U.S. Steel and American Wire insisted the weather was to blame, certainly not the mills that had been operating for decades. The two influential and powerful companies made sure the official report exonerated the plants. Most residents were outraged when investigators failed to blame the two mills. Much like the nearby Johnstown, PA Flood victims, lawsuits were filed, and later settled, but without naming any blame.
‘It was murder! The owners of U.S. Steel should have gone to jail.’
Donora Death Fog survivor
Humans were not the only victims – all of the crops in the surrounding valley withered, as well as many backyard vegetable and flower gardens. Many family pets would suffer the same fate as their owners. It became the worst air pollution disaster in US history. It let the U.S. public know that smog was more than just a nuisance, it could kill!
The two mills reopened the very next week. But the “Donora Death Fog,” was in all the national newspapers and made air pollution a new national concern. The next year, President Harry Truman called for the 1st national Air Pollution Conference, citing Donora, PA by name. A similar, larger disaster occurred in London, England in 1952, called The Great London Smog killing thousands. The U.S. Steel Zinc Works closed in 1957, the American Steel and Wire Mill a few years later. The abandoned mills were eventually torn down and Donora became a classic Rust Belt town. Other industries came to town over the years and built on the riverfront sites.
Republican President Richard Nixon created the U.S .Environmental Protection Agency in 1970, leading to the passage of the The Clean Air Act the same year. Nonetheless, air pollution in eastern industrial cities and towns, like Pittsburgh and Cleveland, remained a problem for decades more. Add the steel mills of Illinois, Ohio and Indiana and air pollution precipitated down upon the northeastern states as Acid Rain, in the 1960’s, 70’s, and 80’s, killing lake and river fish populations all the way from Lake Erie to New England and Canada.
Once the mills closed, the population of Donora dwindled to less than 6,000, with over one-third mill retirees. Some residents blame the government regulators for destroying jobs in their town, though arguably saving their family’s lives in the process. The Donora Death Fog is the pivotal moment leading to the slow adoption of clean air quality regulations in the U.S. years later in 1970. Today, it almost sounds like a 1950’s science fiction movie. But if you have never heard of Donora, PA you owe the victims and their families a debt of gratitude. The Donora dead gave their lives, so many others would later live.