The Public Health Service Investigation
The big federal investigation now shifted noisily into gear. From
November 1948 and through the following spring Donora residents were
bombarded with door-to-door surveys and endless questionnaires from the
Washington investigators. Public Health Service air sampling vans
criss-crossed the steel bridge between Webster and Donora. The town hall
sprouted an air monitor.
Donora residents were elated. They were confident that Harry Truman s
Public Health Service would deliver fair deal answers about the Donora
smog. They also hoped that the federal investigation would help resolve
thirty years of community conflict with U.S. Steel. Many residents saw the
disaster of 1948 as simply the most recent and violent insult the
community had suffered from industry.
When the Donora zinc works opened in 1916 it was the biggest of its
kind in the world, and one of the dirtiest. The plant used coal and gas to
roast the zinc ore and drive impurities into the air. Ironically, and too late
for Donora, that technology was almost immediately superceded in newer
plants by much cleaner technology, which used electricity to melt the ore.'
But U.S. Steel was not prepared to abandon its expensive Donora
investment. Zinc was fetching high prices as a vital ingredient in munitions
for World War I, which was then raging in Europe.
Each day the Donora works billowed out giant clouds of oily and
foul-smelling smoke that drifted on the winds west across Donora or east
into the town of Webster. Local families were outraged by their
foul-breathed neighbor. Webster's farmers and small holders
134
CHAPTER TEN
had chosen the pristine river valley for its natural beauty and the rich soils
long before the zinc works had arrived. Some farmers had been on the same
land since the Whiskey Rebellion of 1794. Now toxic smoke filled their
homes and they watched in horror as the farmland above their town grew
barren, rutted gullies slicing at the balding hillsides.
The children of Donora and Webster were born into a near-eternal
darkness of smoke and fumes, frolicking on land defoliated by chemical
poisons.' Even the dead could not rest. Industry's fumes laid waste to
Donora's lovely Civil War-era Gilmore cemetery. As the rootless earth
eroded down the side of the valley, gravestones toppled and observers
reported seeing dogs make off with human bones.' A 1941 novel by a
former Donora steelworker, Thomas Bell, recalls a view of the zinc works
from the Webster side of the river:
Freshly charged, the zinc smelting furnaces, crawling with
thousands of small flames, yellow, blue, green, filled the valley
with smoke. Acrid and poisonous, worse than anything a steel
mill belched forth, it penetrated everywhere, making
automobile headlights necessary in Webster's streets, setting the
river boat pilots to cursing God, and destroying every living
thing on
the hills. 4
Webster families and some Donora supporters began to organize. The
first health-damage suits against the zinc plant were filed in 1918. Marie
Burkhardt, a Donora resident since 1904, told a jury that since the plant's
opening she had suffered chest pains, a hacking cough, the loss of her voice,
and headaches. The jury found her complaints plausible, and so did an
appeals court judge. Burkhardt won a judgment of $500 against the zinc
plant. Suits like Burkhardt's would continue, angry and unabated, until the
plant closed some forty years later. Although claims in the name of 659
plaintiffs had totaled $4.5 million in 1935, court victories were rare and
settlements were usually tiny; residents faced an uphill battle against the
richest steel company in the world, armed with legions of lawyers to defeat
and delay the protests.'
THE PUBLIC HEALTH SERVICE INVESTIGATION
135
Suits did not get very far, noted a lifelong Webster resident, Allen
Kline. He remembered two or three small victories like Burkhardts. In
one case they got an award of $500. Another won $2500. Mostly people
got tired of fighting.
The children of Webster were some of America's earliest environmental
protesters. Allen Klines name was listed on a lawsuit against U.S. Steel by
his grandfather when Kline was eight years old. His grandfather, an
immigrant from Italy, had built their family home in Webster in 1914. He
owned farmland in the hills above the town. Two years after he constructed
the family s home, the zinc plant was built. For almost fifty years the Kline
s home sat directly downwind from the zinc works. Kline remembers a
1938 visit from distant cousins who lived in Allentown, Pennsylvania, on
the other side of the state. They were supposed to stay for a week, but
instead, "They were here for two days," he recalled. "They didn't know
how we lived under these conditions. . . . We didnt know what it was to
breathe clean air.
After the 1948 disaster in Donora a protest group called the Society for
Better Living took root in Websters treeless soil. The twenty-two-year-old
Kline became the secretary of the Society, which eventually had about 200
members. Its slogan: Clean Air and Green Grass.
For the next decade the Society waged a David-and-Goliath struggle
with U.S. Steel. Tensions ran high in the community. Many Donora
workers saw the Society as a threat to their jobs. Several Society officers
received death threats, reported Kline. "A lot of people made a good living
at the mill, he added. But the tiny group persisted. Its members held rallies,
issued Kline's press releases, and even traveled to Washington, DC. Years
later Kline remembered this Quixotic lobbying trip to the nation s capital.
The self-described "idealistic" young newspaperman and his band of
Webster residents had a fantastic notion: why didn't Congress enact
nationwide laws against air pollution to protect communities such as their
own? Their Washington pleas fell on deaf ears: "I don't think anybody ever
knew we were there," said Kline.
The president of the Society for Better Living, Abe Salapino, and deputy
Kline grew anxious that spring of 1949. They watched as U.S. Steel
public -relations men squired federal health officials around
136
CHAPTER TEN
town, wining and dining them at local restaurants. We were concerned that
they were winning the battle on this gastronomical front, said Kline. But
Salapino owned a local restaurant. Guests came from Pittsburgh for his
delicious meats and pastries, calling first to make sure that the wind was
not blowing zinc fumes into the restaurant windows. Salapino and Kline
now organized a sumptuous meal for the Public Health Service men on
their final night in Donora, courtesy of the Society for Better Living. You
couldnt believe this party," said Kline. "We had most of them drunk. We
decided there is no way we are not going to get a favorable report out of this
group.
That summer, shortly before the much-anticipated PHS report was
released, Allen Kline and other members of the Society for Better Living
got their own surprise invitation. The president of the American Steel and
Wire Division of U.S. Steel, Clifford Hood, wanted them to come to
Pittsburgh for a friendly meeting. Kline was stunned. He had spent the last
year issuing press releases blaming the company for the Donora deaths and
complaining about pollution. At the meeting Hood denied that the zinc
works had caused the disaster, but he conceded that U.S. Steel fumes may
have damaged some vegetation in the valley. The admission was an
about-face from the aggressive position the company had long taken in
court. The meeting then became almost a love session between the two
adversaries, Kline recalled. President Hood gave the twenty-two-year-old a
couple of his Havana cigars. I was terribly impressed by him," said Kline.
The following day the Donora papers reported the goodwill meeting and
the steel company's promises to reduce smoke from the mills. The Society
for Better Living was "perfectly convinced" of U.S. Steel's sincerity, the
newspaper wrote. Kline realized that the meeting had been a
public -relations stunt, a carrot for his group to improve U.S. Steels image
in Donora. For the remaining decade of the zinc plants operation, no air
scrubbers were installed, according to the Society for Better Living.'
While Clifford Hood was passing out cigars to the Webster envi-
ronmentalists, behind the scenes his company had hired the powerful
Pittsburgh law firm of Reed, Smith, Shaw, and McClay, which was
headquartered in Andrew Mellon s Union Trust bank build-
THE PUBLIC HEALTH SERVICE INVESTIGATION
1 37
ing. For much of the century the firm had been fighting citizens in court
who claimed that their health and property had been hurt by industrial
pollution. The well-heeled Pittsburgh lawyers were given new marching
orders after the disaster: defeat the families of the Donora victims in court
and escape any legal requirement to clean up the smelter operation.
Robert Kehoes scientists became the secret weapon of the Pittsburgh
lawyers, serving as U.S. Steels Trojan horse in Donora, nuz zling close to
the official PHS investigation, and prying access to the government
investigation and its confidential data. As a result PHS investigators gave
Kettering officials samples of autopsy mate rial they had gathered
immediately after the disaster — information they should not have given out.
And when two of the Donora dead were exhumed for additional studies in
March 1949, once again Ket-tering officials joined the PHS doctors around
the autopsy table.' A former PHS historian, Lynn Page Snyder, calls this
manipulation of the public trust by Kehoe the "underbelly" of the Donora
investigation. While gaining broad access to the government investigation,
Kehoe was privately working with U.S. Steel to shoot down citizen
lawsuits.
"Ethically, what was problematic to me was that Kettering officials were
given slides with lung tissue, and permission was not requested from the
next of kin of the people who passed away," Snyder remarked. "Some of
the autopsies were done on people who were dug up after they had been
interred. And the PHS and the Borough council and the Board of Health
locally worked carefully with the families of the deceased to convince them
to dig the bodies back up." Kehoe's access to all this medical data was
granted, "without informing area residents of the purpose of Ket-tering
efforts," Snyder added.
Snyder wrote a detailed study of the Donora disaster as a graduate
student, and she grew concerned that the federal government's
investigation had focused on the weather in Donora that weekend, rather
than on the "incredibly filthy" metal-smelting industries. "I am disturbed
by the way it is remembered," she said. "I would like to see more
discussion of the industrial nature of this disaster."
According to Snyder, PHS officials were willing collaborators in efforts
to suppress information about industry s role in the deaths.
138
CHAPTER TEN
When Kehoe prepared U.S. Steels medicolegal defense against the Donora
survivors, for example, he asked his government connections for
information on the exact sequence of deaths and the time and location in
which they occurred. The chief of the PHS s Division of Industrial Hygiene,
J. G. Townsend, wrote back two weeks later giving Kehoe the government
data that plotted the onset of the sickness in Donora during the disaster.
And a second special table of data, correlating smog affliction with
preexisting illness, was sent to Kettering and marked by the PHS "This
information is CONFIDENTIAL and is submitted to Doctor Ashe for his
personal use only.'"
Snyder says that those statistics, which were reworked by Kehoe s team
to narrowly define a so-called smog syndrome, helped to discount the role
of the disaster in the many hundreds of chronic illnesses or deaths in the
smog's long medical aftermath. Many of the lawsuits filed against U.S.
Steel involved such cases. That particular information was helpful to
William Ashe, Snyder pointed out, so that the Kettering people could
construct a legal argument that ruled out a number of claims as being
unrelated to the smog.
The evidence that the federal government had secretly cooperated with
Kehoe disturbed Snyder. It is collusion, she remarked. " I read that memo
[the one marked "confidential"] as evidence of a public health service
person collaborating in the case being prepared by Kettering against the
plaintiffs — the citizens in Donora and in Webster — without their
knowledge." Snyder added, "The information about the illnesses and the
times of onset belonged to the citizens, just like the autopsy material. It was
not information that ought to have been given to a private interest preparing
[to defend a lawsuit] against them."
In October 1949 the PHS report on Donora was finally released. It was
an enormous disappointment to the victims families. They had hoped it
would explain what poison killed their relatives that night and where it had
come from. The 173-page government document, Public Health Service
Bulletin 306, did neither. "They produced a report which looks the size of
the Holy Bible," said Allen Kline, and came to virtually no conclusions.
The government verdict that no single substance was responsible for
the Donora deaths, however, was a triumph for the U.S.
THE PUBLIC HEALTH SERVICE INVESTIGATION
Steel Company. The reports emphasis on the bad weather effectively
endorsed the same argument made by the U.S. Steel lawyers, that the
disaster was not foreseeable and therefore an act of god. Blaming the
weather had opened the door for a legal escape act. The reports failure to
identify which factory or chemical had caused the deaths completed the
corporate getaway. The report did not improve the prospects of the town
one whit, noted Lynne Snyder.
Oscar Ewing — Alcoa s former chief counsel, friend of President Truman,
and head of the Federal Security Agency — wrote the intro duction to the
official final report of the Donora investigation. He was silent about his
past corporate loyalty to Alcoa. He was silent about the fact that the
international aluminum industry had been fighting lawsuits alleging
fluoride damage from air pollution for forty years. And he was silent about
the sixty-three people who had been killed in 1930 in the Meuse Valley air
pollution disaster in Belgium. Instead, Ewing fatuously declared that air
pollution was "a new and heretofore unsuspected source of danger."
Donora had revealed the almost completely unknown effects on health of
many types of air pollution existing today, he added.
It was a rank Washington smokescreen. Alcoa had spent much of World
War II and its aftermath grappling with massive lawsuits and citizen
protests over fluoride air pollution from aluminum plants.' Oscar Ewing s
legal colleague Frank B. Ingersoll was a partner in the Pittsburgh law firm
of Smith, Buchanan, Ingersoll, Rodewald, and Eckert that had fought many
of those lawsuits on behalf of Alcoa; Frank L. Seamans of the same firm
would coordinate a national corporate legal defense strategy in the 1950s as
chairman of the Fluorine Lawyers Committee.
The PHS report itself, "Air Pollution in Donora, Pa — Epidemiology of
the Unusual Smog Episode of October 1948, was written by the
Manhattan Projects wartime fluoride consultant, Helmuth Schrenk. He
was particularly adamant in his efforts to disqualify fluoride as the killer
agent. The possibility is slight that toxic concentrations of fluoride
accumulated during the October 1948 episode," Schrenk wrote.
The PHS report, however, made no mention of the high fluoride levels
in Donora vegetation that Kettering researcher Edward Lar-gent had
gathered during a cloak-and-dagger trip to Donora in the
140
CHAPTER TEN
summer of 1949. Kettering s Dr. William Ashe had written a letter of
introduction for Largent on July it, to the Director of Industrial Relations at
the Donora Works, Mr. E. Soles: Largent ... will be around Donora for a
day or two, looking into the problem of the effects of particulate fluorides
upon foliage and crops. There is no direct relationship between this matter
and the smog disaster, but there may be an additional problem which could
cause the company considerable embarrassment. ... I suggest that the
purpose of his mission be kept entirely to yourself.'
Philip Sadtler had blamed fluoride for defoliating Donora's trees and
grass. Largent confirmed high fluoride levels in local vegeta-tion. 12 Why
the need for Largent's secrecy?
"It sounds like there was a problem with fluorine emissions and it was
clandestine because Kettering did not want other people to know about
it — clear as that," believes Lynn Snyder. "The clandestine part fits in with
the rest of their activities. If they told people like a plant manager, word
would get out, and Phil Sadtler's theory would get more credence.
Schrenks PHS report also dismissed the numerous medical accounts of
long-term health problems caused by air pollution in Donora and the
common experience of the residents who invariably became sicker when
the smelter fumes were trapped in the valley. And critics found the
government report to be laden with mathematical errors, especially when it
came to determining fluoride emissions. The report guessed that 210 tons
of coal burned in homes emitted 30 pounds of fluoride, but 213 tons burned
in the mills gave off only 4 pounds. "No possible reason for the difference
is offered," said the physician and researcher Dr. Frederick B. Exner. On
page 104 of the report, Exner pointed out, waste gas from the blast furnace
contains 4.6 mg of fluoride per cubic meter; on page 108 it contains
one-tenth as much. "An elaborate piece of hocus-pocus," concluded Exner.
"Incompetent, irrelevant and immaterial to prove anything except how
easily people — and I mean those who call themselves scientists — can be
duped.'
The report made no effort to explain why Donora residents were so
terribly injured that weekend while the nearby town of Mones-sen, which
had a steel works and the same bad weather, had been relatively unscathed.
But Monessen had no zinc works, residents noted. A local newspaper
editorialized that the relationship between
THE PUBLIC HEALTH SERVICE INVESTIGATION
141
the Donora Zinc Works and the smog was something that no
investigation is necessary to prove. All you need is a reasonably good
pair of eyes.'
Allen Kline agreed. We thought it was common sense that it was
the zinc works. That is what was different in Donora.
Sadtler knew he could not compete with the Pubic Health Service.
"When the US government says that something is sulfur dioxide and
not fluorine, he said, then people are taking their word and not my
word."
Scientist Kathleen Thiessen is an expert on risk analysis and has
written about the health effects of fluoride for the U.S. Environmental
Protection Agency. For this book she reviewed many of the
confidential and unpublished Kettering documents and compared
them with the official published conclusion by the Public Health
Service on the Donora disaster.' Unlike the PHS report, Thiessen
concluded that, judging from the information included in the
Ket-tering documents, fatal quantities of fluoride could have certainly
have been present in the valley during the disaster weekend, posing a
lethal risk to the elderly and the infirm.
To come to this conclusion, Thiessen first made a rough estimate
of how much air blanketed Donora that weekend. If the Donora valley
was about 2.5 miles long, between 0.5 and 1 .5 miles wide, and some
340 feet deep, then between 320 and 96o million cubic meters of air
lay over the town, trapped by a temperature inversion. The Donora
steel plant had a daily production capacity of 1,450 tons of steel.
Thiessen then calculated that, if each ton of steel requires 2 kg of
fluoride, then as much as 2,900 kg (6,380 pounds) of fluoride could
have been released per day without emission controls. Trapped by the
stagnant weather conditions and suspended over Donora, these
airborne fluoride concentrations could have soared well above the
concentrations set as industry standard for an 8 hour day. (Addition-
ally, of course, the zinc plant was belching out fluoride. But without
surviving data on that plant's daily production capacity, Thiessen was
not able to make an equivalent calculation for how much fluoride it
may also have contributed during the disaster.)
It is not possible, with just the existing documents, to know with
certainty whether fluoride killed Donora s citizens, concluded
Thies-sen. Nevertheless, she indicated, her series of calculations show
that there is the potential that routine releases of fluorine or fluoride,
142
CHAPTER TEN
under conditions of little or no air dispersion, could result in air
concentrations high enough to be dangerous to some individuals in the
general public.
Thiessen was unimpressed with the science behind the official PHS
report. She likened it to similar reports written today, where the intent is to
obscure the truth, not reveal it. My take was that they did a very fine job
of writing lots of words in the hopes that nobody would see through to the
fact that there was not much information there," she said.
Thiessen was especially skeptical of the governments scientific
methodology in exonerating fluoride. Months after the disaster the PHS
investigators measured urine samples in Donora children. The fluoride
levels were low, and the investigators concluded that fluoride had therefore
not been a problem during the disaster. It was a ludicrous argument,
Thiessen explained. "They made a point in their report to say there is
clearly no evidence of chronic fluoride exposure, but you cannot from that
say there was no acute exposure on a given weekend six months ago. But
they tried to do that. You
cant.
Today investigators who want to examine how the PHS reached its
conclusions are stymied. The raw data and records of the governments
Donora investigation are missing from the U.S. National Archives and
cannot be found. It is a shameful omission and a shocking breach of public
trust, particularly as the Donora study was the first federal investigation of
air pollution. "They may have been thrown out, suggested Snyder, who
spent five years looking for these federal records. "Someone may have
decided they were too hot to handle and got rid of them. You have to
suspect the worst."
Philip Sadder confirms the worst. 16 Six months after the disaster, U.S.
Steel and the Public Health Service ran a test in Donora to simulate and
measure the air pollutants that had been present in the atmosphere at the
time. Sadtler was in town that day as the zinc and steel plants fired up and
began billowing their smoke and fumes. He stepped into the mobile
laboratory where government scientists were monitoring the "test smog."
"I looked in and the chemist said, "Phil, come on in.' Very friendly," Sadtler
remembered. "He says, Phil, I know that you are right, but I am not
allowed to say so.
The government conclusion — that no single pollutant had caused the
Donora deaths — helped to checkmate the Donora families who were suing
U.S. Steel. A more grotesque spectacle quickly followed.
THE PUBLIC HEALTH SERVICE INVESTIGATION
As soon as the report was published, Helmuth Schrenk, the fluoride expert
who had led the governments investigation, switched sides. He literally
crossed the street from the U.S. Bureau of Mines in Pittsburgh, joined the
private Mellon Institute as a research director, and signed up as an expert
courtroom witness for U.S. Steel, ready to testify against the very Donora
citizens whose devastated city he had just investigated for the U.S.
government.
It still makes me angry, said historian Lynne Snyder. For the chief of
the investigation to immediately make himself avail-able to be an expert
witness against the plaintiffs of the town is something I would like to have
information about. Did he receive money from U.S. Steel? Did he receive
it after he left the employ of PHS?"
Schrenk joined Robert Kehoe and Harvard University air pollution
expert Professor Philip Drinker as expert witnesses for U.S. Steel.' The
one -two punch of a flaccid official investigation and the defection of its
chief investigator to the side of industry crippled the victims' court case. In
April 1951, on the eve of the first "test case" trial of smog victim Suzanne
Gnora, the plaintiffs' lawyer — the former Pennsylvania attorney general,
Charles Margiotti — settled with U.S. Steel. Facing 160 victim claims
totaling $4.5 million, U.S. Steel settled for a one-time payment of a quarter
of a million dollars to be disbursed among families of the dead and injured.
One-third of the money went to Margiotti. The biggest, richest steel
corporation in the world admitted no guilt nor accepted any obligation to
reduce air pollution.
Allen Kline received a check for $500. Families of the dead garnered
about $4,000 apiece, less Margiotti's third, Kline remembered. There was
much anger at the courtroom deal. "We were furious," Kline said. "We
weren't interested in the suits for money, we were interested in the suits to
publicize what we considered a very serious health hazard."
After the settlement the Donora disaster slipped from public attention.
Philip Sadder s report of fluoride poisoning was almost forgotten. Even
the Society for Better Living grew tired and gave up fighting the zinc
works. The whole thing just seemed to fade away," Kline said. I was
weary of getting nowhere.
Allen Kline never found out what chemical made him sick that
weekend nor what killed so many of his fellow townsfolk. Despite
1 44
CHAPTER TEN
the fumes, Allen Kline remained in the Webster home that his grandfather
had built. The newspaperman developed a whole raft of illnesses, including
a heart problem, diabetes, and a case of arthritis so crippling that he was
forced into retirement, where an electric elevator chair carried him on rails
each night upstairs to bed. Kline's daughter, born in the same Webster
home, died of cancer. When the zinc mill finally closed in 1957 and the air
over Webster cleared, to Allen Kline it was an epiphany. "I didn't know life
could be that grand," he said.
It Was Murder
NINE YEARS AFTER the disaster, two officials from the U.S. Public
Health Service, Antonio Ciocco and D. J. Thompson, returned to Donora,
to work with an air-pollution consultant from the University of Pittsburgh,
John Rumford. Ciocco and Thompson published data showing that Donora
citizens who had been sick during the disaster remained at greater risk of
illness and early death." 1 But John Rumford's explosive findings — of
fluoride poisoning in Donora — were never published. The suppression of
the fluoride findings by the government health experts mirrored perfectly
the evasions and omissions of their PHS colleagues a decade earlier.
Without alerting the public, Rumford had taken soil measurements from
eight locations in Donora, including downwind from the steelwork's blast
furnace. In six of his readings, he found 200-800 parts per million of
fluoride in soil. Downwind from the blast furnace, however, his two
readings were 1,600 and 2,500 ppm respectively. Rumford next studied
health data from the disaster, gathering more firsthand information on
Donora health complaints and inquiring whether reported illnesses were
more severe when temperature inversions trapped pollutants in the valley.
His conclusions were simple. According to a PHS official who examined
his data, Rumford's basic findings were:
1 . That there is a relation between month-to-month variation in
sickness and month-to-month variation in . . . air pollution.
2. That there is more illness in an area over which fluorides are
blown from the factory.
THE PUBLIC HEALTH SERVICE INVESTIGATION
The suspected fluorosis occurred in the same five -block radius
downwind from the Donora steel works where half of the disaster dead had
lived, Rumford reported. His data also showed that cardiovascular
problems grew worse when the smog gathered in the Donora Valley and
that former open-hearth steel workers who handled raw fluoride were
especially affected by arthritis and
rheumatism.
At first the new generation of PHS officials seemed excited by
Rumford's work. The Donora disaster might have a silver lining, they even
suggested. The health data might offer a road map for a nation struggling to
chart new policies to combat air pollution and to determine the health
effects of the most dangerous poisons in the atmosphere. The grim health
effects of fluoride air pollution were very clear in John Rumford s data, the
PHS officials saw. Dr. Ciocco liked this part about the fluoride findings,
reported one of the reviewers of Rumford s work, Nicholas E. Manos, who
was the Chief Statistician of the PHS s Air Pollution Medical Program. In
the case of suspected fluorosis, that is, cases of arthritis and rheuma tism,
Dr. Manos explained, you have a correlation with a specific agent, a
correlation with the wind trajectory, and also a correlation with the
presence of those whose occupation places them near the open hearth using
raw fluoride.
Similar health problems associated with fluoride air pollution had been
seen elsewhere in the country, noted Manos. And Dr. Leon O. Emik, the
Chief of Laboratory Investigations for the PHS Air Pollution Medical
Program, contemplated initiating a bold nationwide study on fluoride's
health effects. "Dr. Emik suggested we study mortality from arthritis and
rheumatism from various cities for possible relation with the frequency of
fluoride air pollution. We must remember in this connection Mrs.
Gleeson's findings of an increase in cardiovascular deaths in Florida after
the influx of plants using fluoride," Manos wrote. (Philip S adder had gone
to Donora, of course, at the request of Florida farmers battling the
fluoride-polluting phosphate industry.)
Instead of pointing a fresh finger at an especially dangerous air pollutant,
however, John Rumford s fluoride findings remained unpublished. And for
more than forty years the 1949 Public Health Service report on Donora
exonerating fluoride has stood as the
146
CHAPTER TEN
established account of the most famous air pollution disaster in U.S.
history. Its critics were largely forgotten, and fluoride slipped almost
entirely from most public discussion of air pollution. When the fiftieth
anniversary of the disaster was marked in 1998, no newspaper even
mentioned fluoride. Philip Sadtler had died two years earlier. At a
municipal church ceremony in Donora an EPA official mentioned only that
the long-ago Halloween disaster had shown that pollution can kill people.
A second EPA official blamed the deaths on "a mix" of sulfur dioxide,
carbon monoxide, and metal dust.
The shabby treatment Donora citizens received from their government
can be attributed, perhaps, to national-security concerns — a consequence
of the urgency seizing the United States as it stared down the barrel of a
fast-approaching global confrontation with Soviet Russia. Fluoride was
critical to the U.S. economy and military defense, and industry's freedom to
use it could not be seriously hampered during the cold war. Maybe it is
because it happened in the late 1940s when the U.S. attention was really
turned to other issues. During the Donora investigation the Soviets
exploded Little Joe and the cold war got underway. Berlin was blockaded.
A lot of big things in foreign policy were going on at that time, says Lynn
Snyder. Or maybe this treatment was simply due to the fact that it affected
a working-class community," she added.
Scientist Kathleen Thiessen also gives a cold-war interpretation to the
shunning of Philip Sadtler and the governments histrionic disavowal of
fluoride as Donora s killer chemical. There certainly was a vested interest
on the part of the government not to get the public upset about
fluoride — after all if we are spewing out thousands of pounds a month or a
day or whatever at Oak Ridge, and probably Portsmouth and Paducah [two
other fluoride gaseous diffusion plants] and some other places, we don't
want the public to get concerned. We don't want to suddenly say, "Hey,
twenty people died because of a fluoride release last weekend.' This would
not be good. We might get somebody upset. The aluminum industry of
course was part of the cold war effort too."
Philip Sadtler held a more basic view. Until his death he remained clear
about what had happened at Donora and who was responsible for these
events. It was murder, he said. I thought that the directors of U.S. Steel
should have gone to jail for killing people.
THE PUBLIC HEALTH SERVICE INVESTIGATION
Although the Donora disaster faded from public view, Federal Security
administrator Oscar Ewing was soon back in the nations headlines. Nine
months after his Public Health Service exonerated fluoride of the
Halloween tragedy in western Pennsylvania, Ewing had a surprise
announcement for the nation: the U.S. Public Health Service was reversing
a long-held position. The ex-Alcoa lawyer declared that his agency now
favored adding fluoride to drinking water supplies across the United States.
11
As Vital to Our National Life
As a Spark Plug to a Motor Car
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