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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