Ch. 9. Donora: A Rich Man's Hocus Pocus: the fluoride
deception by Christopher Bryson from archive.org
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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