Ch. 9. Donora: A Rich Man's Hocus Pocus: the fluoride deception by
Christopher Bryson from archive.org
Donora:
A Rich Man's Hocus Pocus I have felt the fog in my throat The misty hand of Death caress my
face; I have wrestled with a
frightful foe Who strangled
me with wisps of gray fog-lace.
Now in the eyes since I have died. The bleak, bare hills rise in stupid might With scars of its slavery imbedded deep; And the people still live — still
live — in the poisonous night.
Attributed to area resident John P. Clark, whose mother-in-law,
Mrs. Jeanne Kirkwood, aged seventy,
died at Clark's home at 2 AM on Saturday,
October 30, 1948. THE
MOST VISIBLE U.S. air pollution disaster after the war was in Donora, Pennsylvania, where twenty
people were killed and many
hundreds were injured following a smog that blanketed the mill town
over the Halloween weekend of
October 1948. Philip Sadtler, the chemical https://www.blogger.com/null
consultant and antipollution crusader, had gone to Donora immediately afterward and written a report blaming
fluoride. However, his conclusions
were soon
drowned out by the subsequent official Public Health
Service investigation that blamed
a temperature inversion and "a mixture" of industrial pollutants.' Robert Kehoe and Edward Largent also
investigated the disaster and
prepared medical evidence against the Donora survivors who DONORA 115 sued the U.S. Steel Company for damages.
Kehoe s files shine a stark new
light upon these historic events.
Halloween 1948: Donora
WHEN PHILIP S A D T L E R stepped from the train platform onto Donora's cobbled streets that November
morning in 1948, he carefully made
his way up McKean Avenue and past the many churches and Slavic working clubs of the industrial
Pennsylvania town. Grief and
fear still clung to the air. It was only five days after what had been the worst recorded air
pollution disaster in U.S. history.'
Bodies stiffened in Rudolph Schwerha's funeral home. Scores of citi zens had been hospitalized and many
hundreds lay seriously
Sadtler nodded a greeting at a knot of Donora s grim-faced
citizens. He studied them closely,
already gathering clues. Over that Halloween weekend twenty people had been killed in Donora and the
nearby town of Webster. Two more
would die that same week, and many more
would succumb to their injuries in the weeks and months ahead.' An estimated 6,000 men, women, and
children had been sickened, out of
a population of 13,500. They were choked and poisoned in their
homes and beds by a toxic gas from
the metal-smelting plants along the banks
of Monongahela River, which cut between the two towns. The deadly effluent was trapped in the river
valley by a seasonal temperature
inversion. A layer of warm atmosphere had pressed down on the cold dense air below and a blanket of
industrial filth had smothered Donora
and Webster for almost five days. The townspeople were unaware at first that a disaster
was unfold ing. Their Halloween
parade on the Friday night down McKean Avenue was a ghoulish farce. They were just like shadows marching
by, the mayors wife said. It was
kind of uncanny, especially since most of the people in the crowd had handkerchiefs tied over their nose
and mouth to keep out the smoke.
But, even so, everybody was coughing. The
minute it was over, everybody scattered. They just vanished. In two minutes there wasnt a soul left on the
street. It was as quiet as
midnight.'" As
midnight struck, death began to stalk the brightly painted wood-framed homes that climbed the
hills surrounding Donora. 116 CHAPTER NINE Perhaps the first to die was Ivan Ceh, a
seventy-year-old retired steel
-worker. When he was twenty-two, Ceh had set sail from Yugoslavia
to work in the Donora mills. At
around 8:3o p M that Friday evening, as the toxic fumes crept though the town, the unmarried Ceh began
hacking with a dry cough,
struggling to breathe. His torment worsened through the night. With his lungs fighting for oxygen, the
steel-worker's heart suddenly failed
at around l:3o A M. "It was observed that a white frothy fluid was
coming out of the patient's mouth
during the last moments of life," noted one medical report.'
Ceh's violent demise would be typical that night. A Scottish widow who had lived in Donora for twenty-four
years since arriving in the United
States had also fallen ill on Friday. The town's smogs had frequently
left her breathless but this was
much, much worse. She coughed through a
sleepless night, her lungs scrambling for air. Two hypodermic
injections brought no relief and,
at 2:oo A M on Saturday, she also died of heart failure.'
The undertaker Rudolph Schwerha may have been the first to real ize that a tragedy was unfolding. A
telephone call announced the arrival of a
new death, just as his assistant returned to the morgue with Ivan Ceh's
body. "Now I was
surprised," Schwerha told The New Yorker magazine. "Two different cases so soon together in
this size town doesn't happen every
day." Donora's
longest night would be etched in the memory of its residents. Almost fifty years later Gladys Shempp
gestured to the curtains in her
Donora home and described that long-ago Friday of October 29, 1948, as she struggled through air "as
yellow as the color of those drapes. You
couldn't see. Your eyes were burning, and the tears were running
down your face." The following morning, Saturday,
October 30, her husband, Bill
Shempp, was called out to the Donora fire station to give oxygen to residents. The smog had thickened. The
volunteer firefighter crept through
empty streets he no longer recognized. "It was like a
claustrophobia," he said.
"You didn't know where you were. It would take us at least two or three hours to get to one
home." A vision of hell
greeted the firemen. Frightened citizens clamored for oxygen. Shempp released the elixir into a homemade oxygen
tent made out of a sheet or
blanket. It helped, he said, but when the firemen tried to leave, panic ensued. "They were in great
fear of not
being able to breathe, Bill Shempp remembered. They were getting
some relief temporarily, and then
to shut it off on them, we had quite a problem.'" Fire chief John Volk discovered
men and women whose lungs clawed
for air but whose grip on life was slipping. I found people laying in
bed and laying on the floor, he
remembered. Some of them didn't give a damn whether they died or not. I found some down in the basement
with the furnace draft open and
their head stuck inside, trying to get air. ' A doctor's receptionist, Helen Stack, continued to
answer a telephone that had rung
endlessly throughout Friday night with cries for help. Everyone who called up said the same
thing, Stack told The New Yorker.
Pain in the abdomen. Splitting headache. Nausea and vomiting.
Choking and couldnt get their
breath. Coughing up blood.
On Saturday morning Stack called her good friend Dorothy Hollowitti
to check on Dorothys father, whod
also fallen sick from the smog. She
wanted to reassure her friend that the doctor was on his way. Dorothy
was crying when she answered the
phone, said Stack. "I'll never forget what she said. She said, "Oh, Helen — my dad just died! He's
dead!'" Dorothy s father,
the retired steelworker Ignatz Hollowitti, was the sixth victim of the smog." Incredibly,
even by that Saturday after -noon many
Donora residents still had no idea that a disaster was upon them.
Allen Kline was a
twenty-two-year-old sportswriter for the Daily Republic, covering the Donora high school
football games. Donora had a passion for
sports. Hometown hero Stan Musial had just completed another
fabulous season with the St. Louis
Cardinals, batting a league high .376 average. But that Saturday at the football game, it was impossible to see
the players from the press box and
there was a great deal of "coughing and hacking" from spectators, Kline remembered. "It
was almost unbelievable," he added. "It seemed to be nighttime in the middle of the day.'" During the football game an
announcement was made: the children of
Bernardo Di Sanza should return home. The announcer did not mention
the reason, but the
sixty-seven-year-old Di Sanza was dead. The Donora death fog had now claimed eleven victims. 13 On the sideline reporter Allen
Kline heard firemen telling stories H8 CHAPTER NINE about how many people they had
administered oxygen to, and how people
were dropping over here and there. A temporary morgue had been set up
in the Community Center. Kline
quickly called the Pittsburgh offices of the Associated Press and UPI wire services. He discovered that,
ironically, while Donorans were
just learning of the disaster, the Pittsburgh wire services were already reporting the deaths to the nation, sealing
Donoras place in history. Donora residents now heard the
news over the radio. Walter Winchell
broadcast a report on his nationwide show on Saturday evening.
Panic quickly gripped the town,
phone lines jammed with incoming calls from worried relatives and friends, and hundreds of residents
attempted to flee the valley for
higher ground. Poor visibility and choked roads, however, meant that for many evacuation was
nearly impossible, reported the New
York Times. 14
Reports of the unfolding horror quickly reached U.S. Steels
corporate headquarters in
Delaware. Its subsidiary company, American Steel and Wire, ran Donora's zinc and steel works. On Sunday morning
at 3:0o A M, with the death toll
at nineteen, U.S. Steel gen eral counsel Roger Blough made a frantic phone call. He reached the zinc works
superintendent M. M. Neale in Donora
and ordered him to shut the smelter down. 15 The call may have prevented a much greater disaster.
A local doctor, William Rongaus,
later testified that if the smog had lasted just one more evening,
the casualty list would have been
1,000 instead of 20. U.S.
Steel had reason to be concerned. Donora was a company town, entirely dominated by the mighty steel
and zinc plants that stretched for
three fuming and clamorous miles along the town's riverfront. By 1948
five thousand of Donora's men
sweated in those mills, turning out record profits that year for the company.' Even the town's name betrayed
its corporate roots.
"Donora" was an amalgam of the first name of Nora Mellon, the
wife of Pittsburgh industrialist
Andrew Mellon, and the surname of a former company president William Donner. 18 U.S. Steel had long ago
purchased the Donora Works from
Mellon, but the town's corporate character remained; the steel company's accounting department even
drafted Donora's town budget.
19 Donora was famous for its
culture. Many workers were immigrants from Eastern Europe, Slovenia, northern Spain, and Italy. DONORA 119 They had seen
newspaper advertisements placed by steel barons Andrew Carnegie and Andrew Mellon in the
European papers and had arrived in
Donora in the early part of the twentieth century, an excited chorus
of foreign tongues bubbling up the
valley, mingling with earlier Scottish and Irish immigrants and African Americans from the southern
states. The zinc workers — whose
toil at the white-hot furnace face was some of the dirtiest in Donora — were mostly from northern
Spain. Donora was a great
Spanish town, remembered Bill Shempp. They used to have a festival out at Palmer Park every year and
people came from as far away as
California and it would last for a week or so, and they would practically camp out." Today a stroll through a wooded
Donora cemetery whispers a memory
of the new industrial world those immigrants found. Birdsong spills
upon the gravestones, some marked
with distinctive twin-horizontal Coptic
crosses, etched with Slavic, Spanish, and Italian names. Coal barges
still push up the Monongahela
River. A train whistles in the valley below. On one gravestone an engraved photograph of a young man in
an uncomfortable-looking suit
stares out from behind a glass panel like an icon, this grave a final resting place for a long-ago dream
of that Promised Land in western Pennsylvania. In Philadelphia that disaster
weekend Philip Sadtler's father, Samuel
Sadtler, flipped through the pages of his Sunday newspaper. It was full
of speculation that Harry Truman
would lose the coming November election
to Republican presidential challenger Thomas Dewey. But as Sadtler
read, his eyes lit on a short
description of the terrible events in Donora. Time, Newsweek, and the New York Times all carried similar
accounts of the tragedy. Scores of
Donora's sick and injured were being evacuated by air to Myrtle Beach in South Carolina. As he read about the Donora
events, Samuel Sadtler became sus picious. He recalled a similar disaster in Belgium some eighteen
years earlier, when fumes from
metal-smelting and fertilizer factories had been trapped by a temperature inversion and had killed
sixty-three people in the Meuse Valley.
Thousands more had been left ill with respiratory and heart problems. Kaj Roholm and other
scientists had reported that fluoride
emissions from industrial plants 120 CHAPTER NINE in the Meuse Valley had caused the disaster.'
There had been three zinc plants
in the valley. Roholms book sat in Sadtlers library. He wanted his son to go to Donora and investigate the
situation. Father said, That
s fluorine," remembered Philip S adder. I said, Well, so what Dad? I cant afford to go out there. But five days later Philip Sadder
stepped off the Donora train. The
six-foot-tall Sadtler already had his own reputation as a talented
scientist and air-pollution
investigator. He had examined several big fluoride pollution cases just after the war in Ohio, Florida, New
Jersey, and Pennsylvania,
including the so-called Peach Crop cases, linked to the Manhattan Project (see chapter 5).
Sadtler had also measured fluoride
content in vegetation along the industrialized Delaware Valley and
found damage endemic and
widespread. 22 " There were at least ten thousand square miles of damage from fluorine.
Most people did not know that was
going on, he said.
Sadtler's train ticket to Donora was paid for by a group of
crusading Florida farmers. They
were suing phosphate fertilizer plants near the town of Bradenton, on Florida s southwest coast, claiming that
fluoride air pollution was
destroying their crops and their health. Thirty-eight-year-old Sadtler was their courtroom scientific
expert. The Florida farmers hoped
that a verdict of fluoride poisoning in Donora might help their own
court case and worried that the
Donora deaths would be blamed instead on sulfur dioxide, a much less toxic pollutant that at the time was
being generated in large volumes
by the coal used to heat homes.
"The Bradenton farmers called and said, "Don't let them call
it sulfur dioxide,'" Sadtler
told me. They feared that if Pennsylvania's industrialists could point the finger at sulfur
dioxide produced by Donora's coal-burning
citizens, instead of industry's fluoride emissions, then there would be
no one to blame for the disaster.
" All the culprits in the country at that time wanted to call it sulfur dioxide," Sadtler recalled. By
blaming air pollution on sulfur
dioxide, the industrial polluters were safe; fluoride, on the other hand, was much more likely to be blamed
on metal smelters and manu-
facturing plants, and could lead to convictions in court.' 3 (Today
the fluoride researcher and
activist Mike Connett describes sulfur dioxide as the Lee Harvey Oswald of air pollution. Like Oswald, sulfur
dioxide is a convenient scapegoat
and, like Oswald, it is highly PONORA 121 unlikely that sulfur dioxide could
accomplish all that it is blamed for.)
Sadtler thought that the farmers were probably right. He had
earlier investigated some big
sulfur dioxide pollution incidents, and he felt that the damage in Donora sounded a lot worse than sulfur
dioxide ever caused, he said. Now, treading Donora s cobbled
streets, Sadtler continued gath-
ering clues. When the Donora townspeople talked, he watched their mouths. Many had teeth that were badly
mottled, he said. Sadtler knew
that the mottling — the white blotches and chalky marks that appeared on teeth — was known as dental
fluorosis. He knew that such
dental fluorosis was an indication that a community had been
exposed to fluoride over a long
period of time and was a cardinal sign of
fluoride poisoning. Scientists call such long-term and moderate exposure chronic. Larger acute
exposures, on the other hand, such as
burns or serious lung damage, are the sort of fluoride poisoning that might occur during an industrial
accident. Sadtler even joked about
the dismal dental situation he found in Donora, where many workers were entirely toothless. They did not
have any tooth problem with the
employees in the smelter, Sadtler said, because when they went to work they put their teeth in the
locker. No tooth problem. But people
outside [the smelter] did have the mottling. As Sadtler approached the Donora town hall, more
people passed. He heard several
ugly hacking coughs. Respiratory disease such as pulmonary fibrosis, emphysema, and dyspnea (shortness of
breath) is another obvious sign of
chronic fluoride poisoning." He soon learned that the mill town and the surrounding county had a
notorious reputation among local
people and doctors, even within smoky,
industrial Pennsylvania, for lung problems and respiratory
disease." There were
lots of respiratory problems in the area, said the Donora resident Gladys Shempp. Everybody was always
sneezing and carrying on. But they
took it for granted, that was just part of life. Sadtler soon had a third clue to the health of Donora
citizens. He learned that
arthritis was unusually common in the town. The scientist knew that fluoride was stored in bones
as well as teeth; the Danish
scientist Roholm had linked fluoride to arthritis-like symptoms.
Steel mills added a fluoride
mineral called fluorspar 122 CHAPTER NINE to help flux and draw the steel from the
molten ore. Fluoride was among the
worst pollutants of the U.S. steel industry and the subject of millions of dollars in legal claims against steel
mills around the country." The Donora zinc plants also gave off copious fluoride fumes. Working in
the steel and zinc mills, or
simply living in Donora where the poison was breathed each day, had produced very obvious physical
effects, both in the teeth and in
the bones, of the local people he met, Sadtler said.' Philip Sadtler was not the only
new scientist in Donora that day. News
of the disaster had electrified the captains of U.S. industry. They
quickly dispatched their top
lieutenants to western Pennsylvania. That Sunday night, while Donora s firefighters gave oxygen to
suffocating residents,
twenty-eight miles to the north telephones started to ring in Pittsburgh — home to the U.S. Steel Corporation
and the giant Aluminum Company of
America. Industrialists knew that the Donora disaster might get much worse. In the wee hours on
Sunday morning, U.S. Steel
executives had placed an emergency call to the Mellon Institute, whose director, Ray Weidlein, had answered
the telephone that weekend. There
was already a growing national agitation against pollution, Weidlein
knew. The steel industry had
reaped record profits in 1947 and 1948. Yet almost no effort was being made to staunch the torrent of raw
chemical pollution spilling into
waterways and filling the nations skies. Just three days before the Donora disaster Colliers magazine
had reported, with stunning
prescience: It is an American habit to poison our air as flagrantly as
we have poisoned our water. . . .
Given the right weather conditions enough
poisonous fumes are poured into the air every day to produce a
great disaster. It happened once
in Belgium. Now European nations have air
pollution control. Should we wait until some appalling catastrophe
happens here?' An aggressive investigation of
pollution from the Donora factories
might place legal responsibility for the deaths squarely on the
smelters, costing millions in
victim compensation and requiring expensive new pollution-control equipment in fluoride-emitting industries
— not just in Donora, but across
the country. "It would have been very hard on chemical plants. It would have been hard on the
steel industry, it would have been
hard on the aluminum industry, said Philip Sadtler. DONORA 123 There was another
worry. Both the U.S. Army and the Atomic
Energy Commission (AEC) had a secret and vital interest in the outcome of the Donora disaster, Sadder
knew. Vast amounts of fluoride gas
were now needed by the AEC for the uranium-enrichment factories that were being planned and constructed across the
United States in Ohio, Kentucky,
and Tennessee. Sadtler had already
measured high human blood fluoride levels among poisoned peach farmers living near the DuPont Chamber
Works plant in New Jersey, where
DuPont made top-secret fluoride compounds for the Manhattan Project. If fluoride were fingered for
the Donora deaths, it might bring
new scrutiny of worker health safety in those AEC bomb factories, resulting in damage suits and expensive
requirements for air-pollution
controls. It would
have been very hard on the Atomic Energy Commis- sion, said Sadtler. They would have had to pay millions of
dollars in damages if [citizens]
knew the real story.
Newspaper reporters were already sniffing a possible military connection to Donora. Death Smog Eyed
Closely in Washington, headlined
one story in the Pittsburgh Press. Military intelligence officials are watching closely
Pennsylvania s investigation into
causes of the mystery fog at Donora, Pa., wrote the newspapers Washington correspondent, Tony Smith.
The government, he wrote, has
given much attention to possible air contamination around atomic energy projects, and has taken precautions to
guard against it. Other types of
industry, particularly war industries, may also cause air pollution. ... A source intimate with the
operations of central intelligence
said that agency will order one of its own if the results of Pennsylvania s arent considered satisfactory,
Smith continued. Should central
intelligence investigate the Donora smog,
it would undoubtedly be an unannounced and secret operation. The Mellon Institute s Ray Weidlein, who had been a
consultant to the U.S. military on
chemical war gases during World War I, took swift action. On October 31, as an autumn rain fell that
Sunday morning in Donora and
washed the worst of the smog away, suited
strangers began flocking to the traumatized mill town. One of the first to arrive, at 6:00 A M that
Sunday, was Wesley C. L. Hemeon of
the Mellon Institute. For the next month Hemeon would walk 124 CHAPTER NINE Donoras streets,
acting as the eyes and ears of Ray Weidlein and the many friends of the Mellon Institute. Hemeons first stop was an
emergency meeting that Sunday afternoon
held by Donoras Board of Health. Although the meeting was closed to
the general public, the Mellon man
managed to slip in. Passions ran high.
Donora doctor and health-board member William Rongaus rose and told mill officials that the smog was just
plain murder. Air pollution that night
had affected many other towns, he said, but the deaths had occurred only
in Donora and across the river in
Webster. Many of the deaths were within
blocks of the U.S. Steel zinc works. Poison gas from the zinc mill had been injuring
Donoras residents silently and
insidiously since the mill opened in 1915, Rongaus told the board members. It was not only
asthmatics who had been made sick during
the disaster; there were numerous reports of normally healthy
people experiencing
central-nervous-system effects, such as shaking, chronic fatigue, dizziness, and acting crazy.
Many of those symptoms would last
for months. At least one Donora woman suffered a miscarriage that evening as well. 29 I treated many
patients who were young and strong and
never had any symptoms of asthma," Dr. Rongaus stated. All
complained of severe pains in the
lower chest. It seemed to me like a sort of partial paralysis of the
diaphragm. As he sat
through the meeting, Wesley Hemeon of the Mellon Institute grew increasingly nervous. The United
Steelworkers safety director, Frank
Burke, blamed the zinc mill for fluoride and sulfur-gas pollution. Then
it got worse. The steel workers
representative pointed an accusing finger at the medical experts from the Mellon Institute. Workers trusted
neither the Mellon Institute nor
health officials from the Commonwealth of
Pennsylvania to investigate the disaster, Burke announced. State health authorities had done nothing to protect
Donora citizens, despite thirty years
of lawsuits and complaints. This is worse than a catastrophe, Burke
told the Donora Council.
"Twenty of your citizens are dead. Why weren't washers used in the mill to strain poisons out of the air?
We want the facts and we are going
to get them. The president
of Donoras Board of Health, Charles Stacy, agreed with Burke — any state investigation of the
smog would be a whitewash. Stacy
called for an immediate federal investigation DONORA 125 by the U.S. Public Health Service. Like
many Americans, Donora residents
had emerged from the Depression and World War II with renewed faith in the power of the federal government and its
ability to improve living
conditions. Initially, however, Washington pub- lic-health officials had seemed reluctant to get involved in
Donora. Twice during the disaster
weekend federal authorities had dismissed
frantic calls from Pennsylvania asking for government intervention. On Saturday evening, for example, the
mayor of Donora, the badly shaken
August Chambon, had declared a state of emergency and called Washington for help. His own mother had been
stricken. After returning from
shopping, she was discovered lying on the floor, with her coat on, and a bag of cookies spilled all over beside
her, gasping for breath and in
terrible pain, newspapers reported. A quick federal response might have enabled authorities to measure the exact
chemical content of the air
pollution or to draw timely blood samples. On Sunday, however, a second plea to Washington from the
state authorities was
rebuffed. But subdued Mellon
officials soon saw a silver lining in the pro- posed federal inquiry. They faced a public -relations
disaster. Anger in Donora and
Webster glowed hot as molten steel. Daily press accounts of smog victims funerals fanned public
emotion. Each shovel of earth that
fell on the lowered coffins was a drumbeat of accusation against U.S. Steel. The first lawsuits against
its subsidiary, American Steel and
Wire, were already being composed.
The stakes had suddenly become very high, industry saw. Suc- cessful lawsuits could prove crippling
to many U.S. corporations, warned
Alcoa s medical director, Dudley Irwin. He compared the disaster's potential aftermath to the
effects of the Gauley Bridge
sili-cosis deaths in West Virginia during the early 19305.
"The repercus sions of the
Gauley Tunnel [sic] episode on silicosis probably will be dwarfed by the effects of Donora on air pollution,
Irwin told the powerful trade
group known as the Manufacturing Chemists
Association, whose Air Pollution Abatement Committee gathered at the Chemists Club in New York City on
January 2, 1950, in the aftermath
of the Donora disaster. "The Donora incident has not only made the public air pollution-conscious
and unduly apprehensive, but also
it has advanced opinion with regard to the imposition of restrictive measures by many years, said
Irwin. The outcome of 126 CHAPTER NINE the legal action
arising from the Donora experience may set a pattern that could be followed in other areas.
31 Although the cards now
seemed stacked against it, industry had an ace in the hole: a friend in Washington. Only 170 miles from the
grieving mill town, across the
Allegheny Mountains in Washington, DC, the Truman Administration was basking in the sunny afterglow of the
November election triumph. Plum
jobs were going to those who had engineered the upset victory over the Republican Thomas Dewey. One of
President Truman s most trusted
deputies and a key figure in the election victory was fellow midwesterner Oscar R. Ewing. As
acting chair of the Democratic
National Committee, the Harvard-trained lawyer had raised millions of dollars for the election campaign and
had helped to craft the presidents
folksy media image of just plain Harry. 32 After the 1948 election
Oscar Ewing was reinstalled as
head of the giant Federal Security Agency (FSA), in charge of the U.S. Public Health Service. Ewing had a very private past.
For two decades he had been a top Wall
Street lawyer for Alcoa. He strolled to work at his offices on
lower Broadway in Manhattan
swinging a leather briefcase embossed with the gold letters One Wall Street. Inside were legal papers from
the powerhouse law firm of Hughes,
Hubbard, and Ewing. The senior firm
member Charles Evans Hughes had been an Alcoa attorney since 1910. Hughes would subsequently be a
Republican presidential candidate and a
U.S. Supreme Court chief justice, while Oscar Ewing became one of
the most powerful attorneys in
America, earning a reported Depression-era salary of $100,000. 33 During the war Ewing had moved to Washington as Alcoa
s top legal liaison with the
federal government. 34 A key wartime concern of the aluminum manufacturers was, of course, lawsuits from workers
and communities for fluoride
air-pollution damage to health and property. One of Ewing s legal friends was lawyer Frank Ingersoll, from
the same Pittsburgh firm as Frank
Seamans, head of the Fluorine Lawyers
Committee (see chapter 8).
The old friends kept in touch with Ewing, even after he became a Washington public servant. A Dear Jack
letter from Frank Ingersoll in
June 1947, for example, sought Ewing s help in getting a friend
appointed to the Federal Trade
Commission (FTC). 35 Dear Frank, Ewing responded, I would be only too happy to help any- DONORA 127 one in whom you, [Alcoa
president] Roy Hunt and George Gibbons are interested"" In the grim days of early November 1948, Ewings Public
Health Service now echoed industry
s response to the disaster. The same week of the Donora funerals, the U.S. Steel Corporation had taken out a
newspaper advertisement denying
responsibility for the deaths. We are certain that the principal offender in the tragedy was the
unprecedentedly heavy fog which
blanketed the Borough for five days, the company wrote. That same week federal PHS official John
Bloomfield also pinned responsibility on
the weather, telling newspapers the smog had been an
"atmospheric freak."
37 The Mellon Institute was
backing away from direct involvement in the disaster investigation because it wanted "no legal
entangle-ment. 38 Wesley Hemeon
told industry leaders in Donora on Novem ber 8 that he now favored an investigation by the Public
Health Service. A week later, at the
annual meeting of the Mellon Institute s Industrial Hygiene Foundation,
the PHS announced that it, too,
had reversed course. James Townsend of the PHS announced that Donora would be the first investigation
of an air-pollution disaster by
the agency and its biggest project since their aftermath studies of the Hiroshima atomic bombing. 39 The PHS chose Helmuth Schrenk to
head its investigation. Schrenk was
a senior scientist from the Pittsburgh office of the federal Bureau of
Mines, located only blocks from Ray
Weidleins Mellon Institute. And although it was not made public then, nor would the Donora citizens
learn of his dual identify for
more than half a century, Helmuth Schrenk was a poison-gas expert who had worked as a secret
consultant during the war for the
Manhattan Project atomic bomb program. His special expertise was fluoride gas. 40 On November 30 Helmuth Schrenk
and his PHS team moved into the
municipal Borough Building in downtown Donora." It was not a
moment too soon. A day earlier
Philip Sadtler had seized newspaper headlines. He had completed his investigation, reporting that fluorine gas
from industrial plants had killed
and injured the Donora residents. Other toxic gases — including sulfur dioxide and carbon monoxide — had
been in the air that night and
contributed to health problems, he stated, but none of them had been present in quantities to kill.
42 128 CHAPTER NINE Numerous mills in the
area used large quantities of fluoride-containing raw materials, Sadtler wrote. Blood levels of the dead and
injured showed 12 to 25 times the
normal quantity of fluorine," he reported. Another symptom of acute fluoride poisoning
that night, Sadtler noted, included
the widely reported appearance of dyspnea, a shortness of breathing
similar to asthma. Fluoride had
been polluting Donora for years, Sadtler concluded. He reported mottled teeth in Donora residents, the
destruction of farm crops, high
fluoride content in vegetation, crippled farm animals, and the etching of windows by fluoride gas
43 Sadtler publicly sided
with those Donora residents who blamed the zinc works for their long-standing health problems and the envi
ronmental damage. The Danish
scientist Kaj Roholm had identified zinc ore as being high in fluoride content. Ironically, the same zinc
ore used in the Meuse Valley in
Belgium, where 63 people had been killed in that industrial disaster in 1930, may also have poisoned Donoras
citizens. Sadtler spoke with an
official from the New York chemical testing firm of Ledoux & Company, which analyzed metal ores imported
into the United States. That
official told him that the Donora mill had been "smelting high-fluorine content zinc ore from the
Meuse Valley, Sadtler reported. 44
After the Donora mill began using the Belgian ores, U.S. Steel had
asked Ledoux & Company to stop
analyzing the ore for fluorides, noted Sadtler. That was told to me by one of the heads of the
company," he added. But
Sadtler still had some lingering questions about the sequence of events in Donora that weekend.
Temperature inversions and bad fogs were
common during the fall in Donora and along the Monongahela Valley. Why had so many people been killed and
injured that weekend? Why had the
deaths occurred in such a short period of time? At one point nine people died in six hours. Most deaths happened
on Friday night and before noon on
Saturday. Yet the weather was just as bad on Saturday evening, and the zinc mill did not cease operations
until Sunday morning."
"It was really very queer," said Donora's Red Cross director,
Cora Vernon, who was prepared for
more deaths on Saturday evening. The fog
was as black and as nasty as ever that night, or worse, but all of a
sudden the calls for a doctor just
seemed to trickle out and stop. I dont believe we had a call after midnight, she told The New Yorker. DONORA 129 Sadtler suspected
that something had suddenly produced an
extraordinary amount of fluoride that Friday night. He wondered whether top-secret military work had
been going on in the Donora mills.
It might have been that they were smelting something for the Atomic Energy Commission, he
speculated. Perhaps, he said, the
Donora mills were being used that night to roast not zinc ore, but uranium tetrafluoride, to "drive
off the fluorine, so that they could get
the uranium."
Investigative reports fifty years later by Pete Eisler in USA Today and subsequent disclosures by the
Department of Energy, all since
Sadtler's death, have revealed that private industrial plants were routinely used for secret nuclear work
in the 1940s and 1950s. Although
none of these disclosures has mentioned Donora, many have revealed that workers were frequently
injured by that work and rarely
informed about health risks.
Dr. Weidlein Goes to Washington SADTLERS VERDICT OF fluoride poisoning in Donora
maddened industry. An account of
his findings was published on December 18, 1948, in the leading trade magazine, Chemical and
Engineering News. Retaliation was
swift. Sadtler heard immediately from the magazine's Washington editor, who told him that he could not accept any
more reports about Donora.
Although Sadtler had been a frequent
con-tributor — and his grandfather had been a founding member of
the American Chemical Society,
which publishes Chemical and Engi-
neering News — the editor explained that the director of the
Society was now none other than
the Mellon Institute s Ray Weidlein. He told me Dr. Weidlein had been to visit," Sadtler said.
"Why would the Mellon
Institute, supposedly a nonbiased, nonpolitical organization do such a thing? Well, U.S. Steel, the
owners of the zinc works, had an
influence with the Mellon Institute, so it only took a telephone call
to have Dr. Weidlein go to
Washington." Robert Kehoe
also attacked Sadtler. His Kettering Laboratory had been hired by U.S. Steel to conduct a private investigation
of the disaster, and it would
gather medical evidence to fight lawsuits by victims family members and smog survivors. Dr. Kehoe fired off
a blistering volley to the editor
of Chemical and Engineering News,
Walter J. Murphy, on December 22 , 1948. In a letter underlined 130 CHAPTER NINE Personal and
Confidential, Kehoe called Sadtlers conclusion of fluoride poisoning, which had appeared in the
magazine two weeks earlier, "wholly
unwarranted, almost certainly untrue, and a disservice not least to
the families and friends of the
unfortunate victims. (Kehoe did not mention in his letter, however, that he was working on behalf of U.S.
Steel, which was being sued by
those same unfortunate victims. )
The analysis of the blood for fluoride is a very difficult procedure,
Kehoe wrote, and even under
conditions of severe exposure the concentrations of fluorine in the blood [are] quite low. My associates and I
believe that no such results as
have been reported here [ by Sadtler] are possible of achievement, and therefore we regard the entire story as a
deliberate lie or as an
irresponsible expression of technical ignorance or incompetence. Kehoe was careful to keep his attack
anonymous. Since I and my
associates are engaged in investigations at Donora I do not wish to be quoted in any way in this connection,
lest I be suspected of having drawn
conclusions before facts are available, he added. Murphy passed the smoldering
letter to his boss, executive editor James M. Crowe, who responded to Kehoe on January 7, 1949 I have
heard from Sadtler recently, Crowe
wrote Kehoe, and he insists that he has made tests on the blood of victims of the disaster and on vegetation,
etc., in the area and that he has
chemical evidence of unsafe concentrations of fluoride. He claims that he volunteered to check his
analytical methods and results with
the representatives of the public health agencies, but that they
were uncooperative.... I note from
your letter that the analysis of fluorine in blood is quite difficult and that you feel Sadtler could not
have obtained the results
indicated. It seems to me that this is the one point, at least, where scientific methods could be checked and
agreement reached on whether the
results are or are not accurate. It is not our intention to become
embroiled in this matter and
permit our pages to become a battleground for this case, but for our own information we would be
interested to know the results of any
analytical findings of your investigation." Kehoe would send no analytical
results to the magazine. Secretly his
Kettering Laboratory had now obtained a similar blood fluoride result
to Sadtlers. Kehoe s first letter
attacking Sadtler had been DONORA 131 ccd to Dr. Dudley Irwin, Alcoa s medical
director. Alcoa was then
sponsoring Kehoe s fluoride research at Kettering and may have been the master puppeteers in the Donora
investigation. Kehoe s
Donora deputy, Dr. William Ashe, had reported earlier that summer on the crippling disability fluoride air
pollution had caused among
aluminum workers inside Alcoa s smelting plant in Niagara Falls, New York. Ashe thought that poison gas had
caused the Donora deaths. "My
assumption that it was a gas which was
hydrolyzed in the lung and produced its pathology some little time after it was inspired is based on a
very superficial check of the clinical
picture as seen by two doctors and two patients, Ashe told Kehoe. ( When two PHS officials visited
Cincinnati to discuss the disaster
investigation, Ashe advised Kehoe to keep this speculation private.
I think that it would be wise to
refuse to let them know what our
guesses are, he said.)" 8 Following the disaster, Alcoa had quietly obtained a
blood sample from one of the first
Donora victims, Mike Dorance. On December 30, 1948, in a letter marked "CONFIDENTIAL," Alcoa
reported the results of that blood
analysis to Dr. Ashe. The letter, which was also cc'd to Dr. Dudley Irwin, was written by the head of Alcoa's
analytical division, H. V.
Churchill. Alcoa s fears about Donora, and the awful parallel with what Philip Sadder had found, are wholly
evident in this confidential note,
written on company stationery:
"Dr. Irwin suggested that we analyze the sample of blood for
fluo- rine content, and we have
just completed that analysis. This sample
was received by us and contains 20.3 p.p.m. fluorine," Churchill
wrote. I trust that you will find
this information of some use to you"
(emphasis in original)." This blood fluoride level is, of course, almost
exactly what Sadtler had reported
finding in Donora victims — the data that Robert Kehoe had objected so strenuously to seeing
published. Dr. Ashe responded to
Alcoa on January 3, 1949. He pointed out that no fluoride had been found in Mike Dorance s lung tissue,
the only organ tested, and that a
volume of fluid squeezed from the lung had been too small to test. Please be assured that we are grateful
to you for this data and know that
it is completely reliable information. The only problem is: Where did the fluorine come from? Ashe wrote
to Churchill.' The fluorine
finding clearly had some people worried, noted CHAPTER NINE scientist Kathleen M. Thiessen, an expert
on risk analysis who reviewed many
of the Kettering papers on the Donora investigation for this book. Mike Dorance s fluoride-saturated
blood, however, could not be regarded
as proof that fluoride was the killer that week -end, Thiessen said.
If Dorance had inhaled lethal
doses of fluoride that night, she would have expected to see some measurement of fluoride in his lung
tissue, she cautioned.'
Nevertheless, she described the blood fluoride level measured by Alcoa as " excessive" and enough to
kill. That s high, she said. If
that was all you had, you could say it was highly likely that person died of fluoride poisoning." One more dagger was secretly
pointed at Philip Sadtler. When he had
first arrived in the mill town, Sadtler met with a deputy from Pennsylvania's Health Department to
offer his services as an investigator.'
But the official quickly attempted to head Sadtler off, he said. "I
went to the Borough Hall, it was
about 7:30 on a Friday night, met the deputy and he said V I will see you in my office in Harrisburg [the
distant state capital] on Monday,
recalled Sadtler. That killed everything. I had nothing to go on. I was quite upset and there was a
schoolteacher who heard that, and after a
few minutes' conversation he went into the borough council and told [them] they should hear me. So I told
the borough council what I knew and
they appointed me an official investigator. So when I came back a
week later, the union had already appropriated
$20,000 [sic] to investigate or pay
for an investigation, but somebody inserted in pen in the minutes at
his own expense. Therefore I was
not going to get anything from that
$20.000. ' 5 Unknown
to Sadtler, federal authorities had privately warned the Borough Council not to work with the
independent investigator. PHS
investigator Duncan A. Holaday reported back to officials in Washington that Sadtler has broken into print
previously in somewhat the same role, as
one who could solve complicated problems quickly for a sufficient monetary consideration. Local officials
had been given a choice, Holaday
added. He explained to them, The Public Health Service ... could not
work in cooperation with a private
individual who had been hired on a fee basis. It was suggested that if they so desired I would submit to
them a list of competent
industrial hygiene consultants, any of whom would give them an honest appraisal of the situation.
" 10 The Public Health
Service Investigation
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