The Donora Smog Tragedy December 13, 2018

Copyright © 2018                               John F. Oyler 

December 13, 2018

The Donora Smog Tragedy

The Bridgeville Area Historical Society’s November program meeting featured a presentation on the October 27, 1948, Donora Smog Tragedy by Mr. Brian Charlton, curator of the Donora Smog Museum. In addition to his responsibilities with the museum, Mr. Charlton is also an accomplished high school history teacher.

In reality, the Donora Historical Society and the Donora Smog Museum are a single entity. Although the society’s museum is dominated by artifacts and information dealing with the smog tragedy, it also houses an impressive collection of items dealing with the rich history of the Donora area.

In 1899 the area that eventually became Donora had a population of twelve persons. The Union Steel Company, through the Union Improvement Company, acquired about four hundred acres of land along a large bend in the Monongahela River, announced plans to build a major steel mill, and began to lay out building lots for a new community.

The name Donora is a combination of names of the two industrialists who organized the Union Steel Company – William H. Donner and R. B. Mellon (actually Mr. Mellon’s wife Nora). 

By the mid-twentieth century the mill complex, now owned and operated by a U. S. Steel subsidiary, the American Steel and Wire Company, employed eight thousand workers; Donora’s population peaked at about fourteen thousand residents. Five thousand of the workers were employed at the zinc works, the largest in the world at that time, producing the zinc required for galvanizing steel throughout North America. 

The zinc smelting process was hazardous and dangerous work; the speaker did a good job of documenting this with photographs. In addition, its off-gases contained a number of pollutants, notably hydrogen fluoride and sulfur dioxide. A dozen tall stacks discharged the gases high enough in the atmosphere to allow them to disperse safely.

Late in October, 1948, there occurred a temperature inversion, a meteorological phenomenon that prevents the normal upward movement of air near the earth’s surface. The fog that formed quickly trapped smoke and other particulate matter, forming smog, a term originally coined in London in 1905.

Smog was a common occurrence in this area in those days. I certainly remember being in downtown Pittsburgh in the 1940s when the smog was so thick that the street lights were on at midday. I also remember walking across the Smithfield Street Bridge and being unable to see the shore at either end. Although we are sure this smog was deleterious to our health, it lacked the toxic content of the Donora version.

The Donora smog was filled with hydrogen fluoride and sulfur dioxide, both of which attacked the lungs of everyone in the community. It lasted five days, before heavy rains broke the inversion. At this time the smog is credited with twenty seven fatalities; the long term death toll is undoubtedly greater. Hundreds more were hospitalized.

According to the speaker, the magnitude of this tragedy was so great that it initiated the environmental movement that ultimately produced the Clean Air Act of 1970, the Environmental Protection Agency (also in 1970), and the Federal Emergency Management Agency in 1978.  The Smog Museum’s slogan is “Clean Air Started Here”.

Mr. Charlton prides himself on being a dedicated historian. His summary included a plea that we all learn from history, a suggestion we heartily endorse. He mentioned in passing that he found it frustrating that the folks who survived the disaster are unwilling to talk about it, a comment that raises several historical questions.

There certainly is a contrast between the dangerous working conditions in the mills and the eagerness of so many blue-collar workers to put up with them. As bad as this kind of life seems to us today, it apparently was much better than its alternatives at the time.

Similarly, we were shown disturbing photographs of football games and community parades, with smoke pouring out of the mill stacks immediately in the background. Apparently these people were willing to live in such an environment as long as it provided them with meaningful employment. Donora owed its existence to the mill; no American Steel and Wire, no Donora.

Imagine western Pennsylvania if we had not been blessed with coal, oil, and gas natural resources, the fossil fuels that today’s environmentalists want to ban. Pittsburgh would be Beaver Falls or Wheeling; Allegheny County would struggle to support a population of thirty or forty thousand. 

Somehow the generations that preceded us were willing, even eager, to accept working conditions and environmental consequences that today are totally unacceptable. It is our challenge today to find a practical compromise somewhere between these two extremes.

Another unsettling thought is that our society used to have a large number of employment opportunities for young men and women who lacked either the motivation or intellectual capability of advanced education and “white-collar” jobs. As we continue to de-emphasize (or export) manufacturing jobs, we magnify the problem these folks have finding meaningful work. We must find worthwhile employment opportunities for them, as well as for their highly motivated colleagues.

If indeed we want to learn from history, it is important that we consider all of its aspects. It is not obvious that society in the twenty-first century is any better equipped to solve its problems that it was a century ago.

The next Bridgeville Area Historical Society program is scheduled for 1:30 pm on Sunday, January 27, 2019, in the Chartiers Room, Bridgeville Volunteer Fire Department. Graphologist and Handwriting Expert Valerie Weil will discuss “Expressed in Writing”.