In 1948, a major industrial pollution event in Donora, Pennsylvania, a mill town on the Monongahela River about 25 miles from Pittsburgh, brought international attention to the harmful effects of air pollution.
Emissions from two companies, the American Steel & Wire Company and U.S. Steel’s Donora Zinc Works, became trapped in the surrounding valley due to unregulated emissions sickening several thousand residents and killing at least 26 people almost immediately.
Another 50 residents died of respiratory causes within a month of the incident. Even 10 years after the incident, mortality rates in Donora were significantly higher than those in other communities nearby.
Large hydrogen fluoride and sulfur dioxide emissions at both plants were frequent occurrences in Donora. What made the 1948 event more severe was the temperature inversion, which occurs when a layer of warm air becomes sandwiched between two layers of cold air, effectively creating a dome of trapped, calm, cool air and pollution close to the ground.
These trapped emissions contained a noxious mix of chemicals, including sulfuric acid, nitrogen dioxide, fluorine, zinc, cadmium, lead, hydrofluoric acid, sulfur dioxide, carbon monoxide. These mixed to form thick, yellowish, acrid smog that frequently hung over Donora.
The killing fog started Wednesday, October 27, 1948. By the following day it was causing coughing and other signs of respiratory distress. Many of the illnesses and deaths were initially attributed to asthma.
It was not until Sunday morning, October 31st, that operators of the plants met with town officials. The town’s mayor asked the plants to halt operations temporarily.
The superintendent of the plants, L. J. Westhaver, said the plants had begun shutting down around 6 am that morning. The plants resumed normal operation the following morning as a rain began to alleviate the smog.
Controlling Air Pollution
The Donora event heralded change in the public’s perception of the importance of protecting air quality.
The subsequent 1955 Air Pollution Control Act declared that air pollution was a danger to public health and welfare, but also said state and local governments were responsible for “controlling air pollution” by the multinational firms that owned such plants as those that had poisoned Donara.
The Air Pollution Control Act contained no provisions for the federal government to actively combat air pollution by punishing polluters.
The Clean Air Act of 1963, passed by a Democratic Party controlled Congress and signed by Lyndon B. Johnson a month after the murder of John F. Kennedy, was the first federal legislation to permit the U.S. federal government to take direct action to control air pollution.
It authorized the Secretary of Health, Education, and Welfare Anthony J. Celebrezze, an Italian-American immigrant and former Mayor of Cleveland, to organize conferences and take direct action against interstate air pollution where state action was deemed to be insufficient.
A revised Clean Air Act was passed in 1970, the same year the New York State Department of Environmental Conservation (DEC) was established.
In 1971 the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency was established (the same year the Adirondack Park Agency Act was created).
Sixty years later after the 1948 Donora Smog deaths, the incident was described by The New York Times as “one of the worst air pollution disasters in the nation’s history.”
From the passage of the 1955 Air Pollution Control Act, the clean air movement in the United States has faced political and corporate pressure.
As of 2017, some US cities still do not meet all national ambient air quality standards. It is likely that tens of thousands of premature deaths are still being caused by ground-level smog. President Donal Trump’s administration is currently working to roll-back clean air protections.
The Donora Smog Museum can rightly claim that “Clean Air Started Here” because of the events in 1948, which sparked political action nationwide to protect the American public from future incidences of large-scale air pollution poisoning.
Read more about environmental history in New York State.
Illustrations, from above: The Donora Smog of 1948; thickening Smog in Donora, PA (courtesy of the Donora Historical Society); and the wire mill in Donora, 1910.
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