The Donora Fluoride Fog: A Secret History of America's Worst Air Pollution Disaster
The Donora Fluoride Fog:
A Secret History of America's Worst Air Pollution Disaster
by Chris Bryson
The anniversary of the worst recorded industrial air
pollution accident in US history - which occurred 50 years ago this October in
Donora, Pennsylvania - will go virtually unmarked. The Donora incident, which
killed 20 and left hundreds seriously injured and dying, was caused by fluoride
emissions from the Donora Zinc Works and steel plants owned by the US Steel
Corporation.
In the aftermath of the accident, US Steel conspired with US Public Health
Service (PHS) officials to cover up the role fluoride played in the tragedy.
This charge comes from Philip Sadtler, a top
industrial chemical consultant who conducted his own research
at the scene of the disaster.
Fifty years later, Earth Island Journal has learned, vital records of the
Donora investigation are missing from PHS archives. Fifty years later, US Steel
continues to block access to their records of the Donora disaster, including a
crucial air chemical analysis taken on the final night of the tragedy.
The "Donora Death Fog"
Horror visited the US Steel company-town of Donora on
Halloween night, 1948, when a temperature inversion descended on the town.
Fumes from US Steel's smelting plants blanketed the town for four days, and
crept murderously into the citizens' homes.
If the smog had lasted another evening "the casualty list would have been
1,000 instead of 20," said local doctor William Rongaus at the time. Later
investigations by Rongaus and others indicated that one-third of the town's
14,000 residents were affected by the smog. Hundreds of residents were
evacuated or hospitalized. A decade later, Donora's mortality rate remained
significantly higher than neighboring areas.
The "Donora Death Fog," as it became known, spawned numerous angry
lawsuits and the first calls for national legislation to protect the public
from industrial air pollution.
A PHS report released in 1949 reported that "no single substance" was
responsible for the Donora deaths and laid major blame for the tragedy on the
temperature inversion. But according to industry consultant Philip Sadtler, in
an interview taped shortly before his 1996 death, that report was a whitewash.
"It was murder," said Sadtler about Donora. "The directors of US
Steel should have gone to jail for killing people." Sadtler charged that
the PHS report helped US Steel escape liability for the deaths and spared a
host of fluoride- emitting industries the expense of having to control their
toxic emissions. (A class-action lawsuit by Donora victims families was later
settled out of court.)
In 1948, Sadtler was perhaps the nation's leading expert on fluorine pollution.
He had gathered evidence for plaintiffs across the country, including an
investigation of the Manhattan Project and the DuPont company's fluoride
pollution of New Jersey farmland during World War II [see "Fluoride and
the A-Bomb," 1997-98 EIJ http://www.trufax.org/fluoride/bomb.html].
For giant fluoride emitters such as US Steel and the Aluminum Company of
America (Alcoa), the cost of a national fluoride clean-up "would certainly
have been in the billions," said Sadtler. So concealing the true cause of
the Donora accident was vital. "It would have complicated things
enormously for them if the public had been alerted to [the dangers of] fluoride."
A 50-Year Cover-up
US industry was well-placed to orchestrate a whitewash of
the Donora investigation. The PHS was then a part of the Federal Security
Agency. The FSA, in turn, was headed by Oscar R. Ewing, a former top lawyer for
Alcoa. Neither his old industry connections, nor the fact that Alcoa had been
facing lawsuits around the country for its wartime airborne fluoride pollution
was mentioned in Ewing's introduction to the official report on Donora.
Sadtler remembers seeing a PHS van in Donora conducting air testing after the
disaster. "I looked in and the chemist said, 'Phil, come on in.' Very
friendly. He says, 'I know you are right, but I am not allowed to say so.' He
must have been influenced by US Steel."
Sadtler blamed fluoride for the Donora disaster in an account published in the
December 13, 1948 issue of Chemical and Engineering News. He reported fluorine
blood levels of dead and hospitalized citizens to be 12 to 25 times above
normal, with "primary symptoms of acute fluorine poisoning, dyspnea
(distressed breathing similar to asthma) ... found in hundreds of cases."
He recommended that, "Changes should be made in suspect processes to
prevent emission of fluorine-containing fumes."
Industry moved quickly to silence Sadtler, who had been a contributor to
Chemical and Engineering News for many years. (C&EN is published by the
American Chemical Society.)
"I had a call from the editor that I was not to send them any more
[articles]," Sadtler said. The editor told Sadtler that the head of the
Alcoa and the US Steel-funded Mellon Institute, Dr. [first name] Weidline (who
also had served as a director of the American Chemical Society) "went to
Washington and told [the magazine's editors] that they were not to publish any
more of what I wrote," Sadtler said.
Looking Back on Donora
Today, 50 years later, researchers examining the Donora
disaster face two troubling obstacle: (1) vital records are missing from the
PHS archives and (2) US Steel's records are closed to reporters, researchers
and investigators.
In her 1994 doctoral dissertation ("The Death-Dealing Smog Over Donora,
Pennsylvania: Industrial Air Pollution, Public Health Policy and the Politics
of Expertise, 1948-1949"), Lynne Page Snyder of the University of
Pennsylvania, described the response to the disaster.
The following excerpts were published in the Spring 1994 issue of the
Environmental History Review.
"Pollution from the Donora Zinc Works smelting operation and other sources
containing sulfur, carbon monoxide and heavy metal dusts, was trapped by
weather conditions in the narrow river valley in and around Donora and
neighboring Webster.
"Air pollution problems were recognized from the facility as early as
1918, when the plant owner paid off the legal claims for causing pollution that
affected the health of nearby residents.
"In the 1920s, residents and farmers in Webster took legal action again
against the company for loss of crops and livestock. Regular sampling of the
air was begun in 1926 and stopped in 1935."
From local accounts of the time, Snyder provided this description of the 1948
disaster. "By Friday evening (October 2), local residents were crowding
into nearby hospitals and dozens of calls were made to the area's eight
physicians. While Fire Department volunteers administered oxygen to those
unable to breathe, Board of Health member Dr. William Rongaus led an ambulance
by foot through darkened streets to ferry the dead and dying to hospitals or on
to a temporary morgue.
"On Rongaus' advice, those with chronic heart or respiratory ailments
began to leave town late Friday evening, but before noon on Saturday, 11 people
died. "Conditions had not improved by Saturday night, and with roads
congested by smog and traffic, evacuation became impossible. The company operating
the Donora Zinc Works finally ordered the plant shut down at 6 a.m. Sunday
morning. By mid-day Sunday, rain had dispersed the smog.
"Pittsburgh itself escaped the episode primarily because it had just begun
to enforce a smoke control ordinance and was cutting back on the use of
bituminous coal as a fuel source. The Donora Smog gained national attention
when Walter Winchell broadcast news of the disaster on his national radio show.
"The Pennsylvania Department of Health, United Steelworkers, Donora's Borough
Council and the US Public Health Service all participated in the investigation
of the air pollution incident. The investigation was the first time there was
an organized effort to document the health impacts of air pollution in the
United States. Commenting on the studies of the incident, the Monessen Daily
Independent wrote that damage from air pollution from the Zinc Works was
'something no scientific investigation is necessary to prove. All you need is a
pair of reasonably good eyes.'
"Before the Donora smog, neither manufacturers nor public health
professionals considered air pollution an urgent issue. At the annual meeting
of the Smoke Prevention Association in May 1949, a leading industrial physician
and consultant to insurance companies dismissed air pollution as a threat,
except 'on rare occasions [when] Mother Nature has played us false.''
"The studies of the Donora Smog did not fix blame and could not document
levels of pollution beyond workplace limits set at the time. The Public Health
Service recommended a warning system tied to weather forecasts and an air
sampling system be installed to avoid future incidents. The lessons learned at
Donora resulted in the passage of the 1955 Clean Air Act and began modern air
pollution control efforts in the Commonwealth.
Snyder learned that US Steel had conducted an air analysis on the final night
of the smog. But despite her numerous requests for the Donora records, Snyder
recalls, US Steel officials finally informed her that they didn't "have
anything for me."
Equally frustrating to Snyder was the missing PHS records. At the time, Donora
was the largest environmental investigation the government agency ever had
mounted. "The kinds of papers I would expect to find are the
correspondence files, the original and carbon copies of responses sent out,
typed-up site visits, typed-up telephone conversations, maps, rough drafts of
reports, photos," Snyder explained. But all these records have vanished.
"You have to suspect the worst. Not only of US Steel, but of the Public
Health Service," Snyder says. Now herself a PHS historian, she concludes
of the Donora records, "Someone may have decided they were too hot to
handle and got rid of them. I'm open to that prospect."
Transcripts of Philip Sadtler's historic full interview are available from
Earth Island Journal.
Chris Bryson is a New York-based investigative reporter and co-author with Joel Griffiths of Fluoride and the A-Bomb (Winter 97-98 EIJ) http://www.trufax.org/fluoride/bomb.html. This report was compiled with research assistance by Ellie Rudolph.
Death in Donora
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 my 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.
Folklorist Dan G. Hoffman reported collecting the ballad "Death in
Donora" from area resident John P. Clark
Sidebar
Fluoride and the Mohawks
Cows crawled around the pasture on
their bellies, inching along like giant snails. So crippled by bone disease
they could not stand up, this was the only way they could graze. Some died
kneeling, after giving birth to stunted calves. Others kept on crawling until,
no longer able to chew because their teeth had crumbled down to the nerves,
they began to starve.
These were the cattle of the Mohawk Indians on the New York-Canadian St. Regis
Reservation during the period 1960-75, when fluoride pollution from neighboring
aluminum plants devastated the herd and the Mohawks' way of life.
Crops and trees withered, birds and bees fled from this remnant of land the
Mohawk still call Akwesasne, "the land where the partridge drums."
Today, nets cast into the St. Lawrence River by Mohawk fishers bring up
ulcerated fish with spinal deformities. Mohawk children, too, have shown signs
of damage to bones and teeth.
In 1980, the Mohawks filed a $150 million lawsuit for damage to themselves and
their property against the companies responsible for the pollution: the
Reynolds Metals Co. and the Aluminum Co. of America. But five years of legal
costs bankrupted the tribe and they settled for $650,000 in damages to their
cows.
The court left the door open for a future Mohawk suit for damage to their own
health. After all, commented human rights lawyer Robert Pritchard, "What
judge wants to go down in history as being the judge who approved the
annihilation of the Indians by fluoride emissions?"
- Joel Griffiths
The lessons learned at Donora resulted in the passage of the 1955 Clean Air Act
America's worst air pollution disaster may have been caused by fluoride
emissions:
50 years later, vital records are still missing.
Last modified:
2 December 1998
http://www.actionpa.org/fluoride/donora-fog.html
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