“The Death-Dealing Smog Over Donora, Pennsylvania”: Industrial Air Pollution, Public Health Policy, and the Politics of Expertise, 1948–1949

Abstract

A few days before Halloween, 1948, a heavy fog blanketed the Northeast and Midwest. Severe atmospheric conditions cloaked airports, slowed traffic to a crawl, dispatched people with respiratory ailments to the hospital for oxygen, and coated surfaces with a sticky film of muck.2 Pittsburgh survived the episode without daytime street lights, a credit to a newly-enforced smoke control ordinance and to the city's decreasing reliance upon soft coal fuel.3 But thirty miles southeast of Pittsburgh, along the Monongahela River, the situation worsened critically for the steel town of Donora and its downwind neighbor, the city of Webster. On Saturday, October 30th, seventeen This content downloaded from 128.195.76.53 on Sun, 17 Jan 2016 05:35:11 UTC All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions 118 ENVIRONMENTAL HISTORY REVIEW SPRING people died in the space of twelve hours and thousands more were left gasping for breath. A day later, the suffocating conditions lifted as quickly and as mysteriously as they had descended. In the years since 1948 the name "Donora" has become a legend in twentieth-century environmental history.4 Internationally, it has symbolized the excesses of postwar economic growth visible in Southern California's eyestinging haze, from which the name for the disaster, the Donora smog, was coined. In the 1950s this interpretation spurred urban campaigns for smoke control ordinances. Among scientists, engineers, and physicians, the smog episode catalyzed a decade of work to understand the freshly perceived threat of air pollution to public health. In Washington, D.C., Congress and U.S. Public Health Service (USPHS) officials crafted new environmental policy in the form of provisions for research support, training, and technical assistance in the 1955 Clean Air Act. But interpretations of the meanings of the smog have been based on descriptive accounts of the era. They do not analyze the historical influence of manufacturers upon public discussion about air pollution. In the case of the 1948 disaster, controversy over the role of a zinc smelter framed explanations about how air pollution threatened public health. As witnesses to three decades of environmental deterioration, many local residents blamed Donora's mill for the mass deaths and illnesses. Others fearful of losing their industrial jobs downplayed the linkage between smelter effluent and the smog. Zinc Works managers, lawyers, and the experts they retained emphasized the role of inclement weather and the region's hilly terrain in precipitating the disaster. A USPHS survey of the smog became an opportunity to mediate among a number of competing explanations. Smog investigations, particularly the USPHS survey, expressed and reinforced beliefs about the economic dependency of Donora-area residents upon the Zinc Works. This was achieved in part by blaming weather and topography for concentrating pollution to a deadly level, rather than the Zinc Works for causing or disproportionately contributing to the smog episode. The choice of an epidemiological study laid a foundation for the development of new policy and bolstered arguments for urban smoke control ordinances. At the same time, an emphasis upon health-effects research helped protect the Zinc Works against liability for the disaster and supported continued operation of the mill at further risk to the community. In the context of regional history, a smog explanation that stressed weather and topography helped protect against the threat of litigation This content downloaded from 128.195.76.53 on Sun, 17 Jan 2016 05:35:11 UTC All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions