From the issue dated October 25, 2002
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The Heavy Air of Donora, Pa.By DEVRA LEE DAVISMy Bubbe Fanne loved what we western Pennsylvanians call "rolly coasters." Every year the entire family joined our small town's annual expedition to Kennywood Park near Pittsburgh to ride some of the best coasters in the country. I loved the thrill of sitting securely next to my large, soft grandmother while being dragged slowly upward, and then whooshing down so fast you simply had to scream to breathe. Once, when I was 5, as we staggered off the famous Jack Rabbit with its double-dip drop, Bubbe Fanne brought me over to greet her cousin Sadie. She said to Sadie proudly in Yiddish, "This is my granddaughter! She is a little devil, with a big mouth." Though Bubbe had bragged about my ability to speak, I could not. Sadie had arrived a few months earlier from Europe, where everyone's relatives seemed to come from, and had been the subject of conversations I barely understood. Still flushed and breathless from the ride, I found myself facing a strangely silent, ghostlike woman. I don't remember if I even looked at her face: My eyes went to her forearm. On her freckled skin were some faded blue numbers, a bit deeper than the USDA stamps on the meat my mother used to buy from the butcher. Following my gaze, my grandmother said, "Tell her, Sadie! Tell her what this means!"
Other survivors swore that nobody would ever forget. One who made sure to pass on his memories of what lay behind those numbered arms was Sol Filler, the father of my friend the performance artist Deb Filler. On August 4, 1942, Sol and his brother Tootzie had their last kiddush supper in the small Polish village of Brzozów. In their town at the foothills of the Carpathian Mountains, in the province of Galicia, Jews were being shot in the streets as the family prepared to say goodbye. The two brothers meant to run away into Russia that night with some teenage friends. Their plans were thwarted when the mayor, a Nazi collaborator, knocked on their door during the meal and demanded that their father produce bread for the army. "Either you bake 400 loaves of bread tonight," the mayor told them, "or I will shoot you myself." The brothers stayed; the bread was baked. Their friends who ran away were never heard from again. The Nazis murdered all the residents of Sol's village, except three: Fourteen-year-old Sol, his brother, and his father were spared because they ran the town bakery. The Nazis needed bread more than they needed three more dead Jews. At Auschwitz, Sol went through another numbing process of selection. Out of 25,000 persons who arrived, all but 500 were gassed. Having the skill of baking, Sol was picked for work. In January 1945, as the Germans retreated before the Soviet Army, they forced thousands to march 500 kilometers westward through bone-chilling cold to the remnants of their phony model work camp at Thereisenstadt. Starving and in rags, Sol understood that as long as he could keep moving, he had a chance of staying alive. When the war ended he landed at a displaced person's camp in Dachau. He said he began to feel like a human being again only in the winter of 1946, when he heard Leonard Bernstein perform George Gershwin's "Rhapsody in Blue." Some 40 years later, Sol and Deb trekked through his remarkable path of survival. During their journey they encountered one of the frequent tour groups at Thereisenstadt. "About 20,000 people left Auschwitz to march here," said the guide with well-rehearsed authority. "A lot of them survived. The Germans kept meticulous records of all this. They kept reports on everyone who ever came here. ... Here was the torture chamber." Much to the woman's surprise, Sol objected. "'Scuse me. That is not true! How could you say such a thing? Nobody was writing down the numbers. I came here from Auschwitz with only 200. We started with 90,000. We were eating grass along the way. Nobody was counting the bodies. For three days we sat in this cell with no food. Bodies were all around us. If I had died here, nobody would have known."
The Talmud says whoever saves a single life, it is as if she has saved the entire world. Like Sol Filler, I have come to believe it is a moral necessity that each fate be counted. That the Nazis did not even bother to keep track of all those they murdered compounds the obscenity of their crimes. We cannot change the past, but we can and must bear witness so that the future may be different. It makes no difference whether we are remembering millions or a few felled by a hidden, local epidemic. Those of us who survive must enumerate, count, tally, and measure what has happened. We must record and pass on the truth. Donora, Pa., was the kind of place where an adventurous 3-year-old like my brother Marty could wander three miles away from home and never really be lost. He made front-page headlines both times he did it -- "Runaway Marty Does It Again!" read the second one -- but each time, somebody brought him back up the steep hills, around the curvy, slag-lined, coal-paved roads, back to our house. All of us children roamed free. Behind my house was a barren stretch of caked, light brown earth the size of two football fields. At its edge, the smooth dusty ground sloped down, at an angle perfect for sliding, to some black ditches with iridescent pools of oily water at the bottom. After a few hours of playing with my friends in the fantastic cracks and crevices of this field, I usually found myself half a mile down the road, at my beloved grandmother Bubbe Pearl's house. She was always home, and her bedroom was perfumed with the smell of chicken soup. Nestled into the hillside inside a sharp horseshoe bend in the Monongahela River, Donora had sprung up around its metalworks and steel industry. In 1900, William Donner began building an iron mill alongside the fast-moving river, and enough immigrants showed up for jobs that the town was officially incorporated a year later. By midcentury it featured a church or two on most corners, an intense Little League system, and one of the best high-school football teams in the valley. The main street ran for two blocks with no traffic light and was anchored at one end by the Fraternal Order of Eagles, the Masons, the Polish Falcons, the Sons of Croatia, and a bowling alley. An ice-cream cone with two big scoops would cost a nickel at Weiss's Drug Store, and at Niccolanco's a single penny could buy a child a fortune in sugar: 5 Tootsie Rolls, 3 red-hot jawbreakers, or 10 of the smaller gumballs. Nobody needed a clock. Dinner times, school recesses, and PTA meetings were announced by the shrieking mill whistles. When there was a fire, long blasts from the mill would signal what precinct of the town the fire was in. Short blasts would indicate the street number. Any time a fire whistle went off, anyone who could stopped whatever he was doing to go help. The firemen were all volunteers. Everybody in Donora either worked for "the world's largest nail mill," as the sign above the factory gate announced, or worked to feed, clothe, fuel, or take care of those who did. After a full day in the factory, men would go to work on their second jobs: building the family home. First they would dig a basement and line it with concrete blocks; then they would live there until they had saved enough money to buy materials for another floor. Sometimes people lived in their basements for years after they had finished other floors because they could not bear to get the upstairs dirty.
My mother had just put a kettle on to boil. "Why do you ask?" she said. "Well, there are several Allentowns, several Websters, a couple of Eagles. There's Pittsburg, Kan., and Pittsburgh, Pa. So maybe there are a few Donoras?" She moved into the kitchen and sat down on the bench next to the built-in white table. I followed her in, took a big breath, and continued to press. "I read in a book at school that in a town with the same name as ours, there was pollution. Was Donora polluted? Or was there another Donora?" I could not imagine that what I'd read had anything to do with where I'd grown up. I had never heard about our town being anything other than a wonderful place. I had never heard of pollution. The word sounded dirty, something to be ashamed of. At first I thought she was going to tell me about someplace else, another Donora somewhere. I was pretty sure of that, but then I could tell she was hesitating. She sighed and finally replied. "Nobody knew from pollution then. That was just the way it was. We didn't think much about it." "Remember all that grime we had on the cars, how we had to drive with the headlights on at 3 in the afternoon? How the sun didn't shine for days at a time? Remember how women always had their curtains hanging out to dry every week? A lot of us gave up on curtains altogether. Venetian blinds were better, because they could be wiped down. My mother's house had 36 windows, and we were always washing them. By the time we got to the last one, the first was already soiled. They were never really clean." I had expected an explanation, but what she gave me was reminiscence. There in the sunny kitchen of our big house, 10 years and 30 miles away from our old town, it felt like we were on another planet. Outside I could see the sunlight on the green grass. Bubbe Pearl had never made it out of Donora. She had once been famous for her strength -- the first woman in the valley to hand-crank a Model-T Ford. A legendary driver, she frequently drove the nine hours to Atlantic City with her five children beside her, long before there was a Pennsylvania Turnpike. But when I was growing up she kept her bed in her dining room because she could not make it up the stairs to the bedroom. She could never be more than a few steps away from an oxygen tank. Traveling beauticians regularly attended to her and to dozens of other women who were too sick to walk up and down the hills to the beauty parlor. When I was very young, I simply assumed that all blue-haired grannies stayed in bed, tethered to oxygen tanks. "But they say people got really sick in Donora. Did people get sick?" "Well, we used to say, 'That's not coal dust, that's gold dust.' As long as the mills were working, the town was in business. That's what kept your Zadde and your father employed. Nobody was going to ask if it made a few people ill. People had to eat." So Donora was famous, but no one ever talked about it. We lapsed into silence. Every child in Donora knew how to make steel. You needed limestone, coal, and iron ore. A pamphlet handed out at one of the Donora Steel & Wire Works' annual open houses explained that a day's operation required 45 carloads of iron ore, 40 cars of coke, 6 of limestone, and 6 of miscellaneous materials. Each day that plant burned as much coal as all the homes in Pittsburgh. These ingredients regularly arrived via massive coal-fired barges snaking up the Monongahela River. Along the Donora side of the river, we could watch the barges rising through the intricate system of locks. Huge metal gates would open, the giant vessel would slowly move inside as if being swallowed by some gigantic whale, and then the gates would bellow with the crunching, creaking, groaning sounds of metal on metal as they majestically swept shut. The captain would tie up to the side of the lock with oily, blackened hawsers as thick as my leg, crossing them at bow and stern. The lockmaster and barge captain would wave a thumbs up, and hundreds of thousands of gallons of muddy river water would surge into the lock. Then, with a movement that never ceased to amaze us, the ship would gradually inch upward, as though lifted by some phantom force, until it could float out the other side and continue its journey to the mills. More than anything else, coal was essential to keeping Donora alive. It heated our homes and fired the massive furnaces and ovens of the mills. Mountainous piles of coal at the mills meant the town was in business. In addition to needing coal for the furnaces, steel making depended on a derivative of coal called coke. Coke was essentially coal with the greasy impurities baked out at hellish temperatures. As a blacksmith hammers a piece of wrought iron to shape it, he must keep it hot so that it remains soft. In charcoal-fired forges like those in Donora, carbon solids and carbon monoxide remain in contact with the iron surface at relatively high temperatures. The hammered surface combines with small amounts of carbon (the iron is carburized) to create a new alloy. When it contains around one part per thousand of carbon, iron is no longer ordinary iron; it becomes steel. This small trace of carbon distributed throughout the dense mass of iron makes it stronger, so that it will take a better edge, build a stronger bridge, or support a taller building than almost any other material humans know how to make. A coke oven in 1950 was a pretty simple affair, a gigantic beehive about the size of a one-car garage, built in honeycomb fashion out of fired bricks. Coal was shoveled in and heated to intense temperatures; coke came out. The gases and smoke that are baked out of the coal are supposed to remain completely in the oven, but they do not. Seductively sweet aromatic hydrocarbons fill the air and ground nearby. A commercial coking operation required a string of about 18 ovens, called a battery. Like a great shark that has to keep moving to stay alive, a coke battery had to run all the time, at temperatures above 2,000 degrees Fahrenheit. If the ovens ever cooled, they could not be restarted because the bricks crack below 800 degrees. This meant that once an oven was fired, hardy souls with a good tolerance for heat had to carefully stack bricks over the opening to keep the temperatures up. Folks who worked the ovens tended to be young. In the 1950s, the mill in Donora still relied on blast furnaces to melt iron for the open hearths, each of which held 110 net tons. The basic process of steel making cooked iron ore into pig iron in these massive furnaces and then converted this into steel in open hearths. The center of the blast furnace is an area called the "dead man," where nothing moves. Molten iron has to flow around this space before dropping to the bottom. Every few hours about 1,450 tons of molten pig iron were tapped out into 40-ton brick-lined ladles that would be carried to the open hearths to become steel. Limestone served as a kind of chemical sponge, to dissolve silica and other impurities. When simmered to the right point, this amalgam floated above the liquid pig iron, where it could be skimmed off as slag. Sluice gates from the furnace channeled the steaming, molten slag into waiting gondola cars shaped like giant teacups. The train was hauled to the dump, where its smoldering cargo was poured off between the surrounding bluffs, forming moonlike, jagged-edged shapes as they cooled. On summer evenings, my family and I would sit in lawn chairs behind our house and watch the fiery spray of what was called kish. Burning graphite scattered off the ladles that drew hot iron from the furnace, turning them into gigantic, brilliant sparklers. Each minute of the day all year long, five vertical blowing engines sucked in 42,000 cubic feet of hot air, yielding thousands of cubic feet of gas. These gases plus lots of reddish iron ore and other dusts flamed like a rocket's trail when burned through a single stack atop the furnace. I loved the spectacular shower of sparks and sprawling fires that lit up the sky for miles. The night sky, glowing with fiery dusts and gases from the furnaces, was a fiercely hypnotic sight. The greatest enemy of steel, oddly enough, is air. Oxygen is constantly trying to bind with iron to create that permanent orange layer known as rust, and the steel had to be coated to keep out moist air. Products intended for outdoor use could be given a galvanic shield. That essentially meant plunging the steel into a bath of molten zinc at about 850 degrees. The zinc would bond to the surface of the steel, forming a series of layered zinc-iron alloys. When done properly, these alloy coatings last decades. During the violent work slowdowns and protests before World War I that gave rise to the big steelworkers' union, Donora remained staunchly anti-union. For being the consummate company town, it was rewarded with a zinc plant. The new zinc works was built in 1915 as one of the world's largest facilities; it stretched for 40 acres along the river and was out of date the moment it opened. Its massive coal-fired furnaces were already giving way to electrically powered plants that were less smoky and that did not create such quantities of toxic zinc fumes. Its smokestacks, moreover, were less than 150 feet tall, too short to propel their contents above the 600-foot hills around them. Working zinc was like coking, only worse. The zinc furnaces were so hot that you could see heat rising from them for miles, in rivulets of distorted light, like fun-house mirrors. At its peak, the Donora Zinc Works employed about 1,500 men, who enjoyed an average workday of just three hours and yet received the highest wages in town. There was some difference of opinion about why this was. The workers themselves used to say it was because they were so efficient that they could fill the ovens in three hours with as much raw material as could be processed in an entire day. A historian of the town's pollution, Lynn Snyder, maintains that zinc workers worked a three-hour day because nobody could have tolerated more time than that in front of the red-hot furnaces. Zinc is one of those elements that the body needs in very small doses in certain forms, but that is poisonous in larger amounts and other forms. When bound with sugars in microdoses, zinc probably fights colds by killing rhinoviruses. But when combined with gases of sulfur, carbon, fluoride, or nitrogen, zinc can be exceptionally dangerous. And it was not the only poison rising from those ovens. The smelting of zinc and the making of steel both use lots of fluorspar, a rock made of crystals of fluorine tied with calcium. During smelting, fluorspar creates a penetratingly and corrosively toxic fluoride gas which can eat the gloss off light bulbs, etch normal glass, and scar the teeth of children. One investigator found that mottled teeth, characteristic of fluoride poisoning, were common in Donora. My father had teeth like that -- mottled no matter what he did. We figured he simply hadn't brushed enough as a kid. Fumes from the mills, coke ovens, coal stoves, and zinc furnaces were often trapped in the valley by the surrounding hills. They gave us spectacular sunsets and plenty of barren dirt fields and hills to play on. October 26, 1948, brought a massive, still blanket of cold air over the entire Monongahela Valley. All the gases from Donora's mills, its furnaces and stoves, were unable to rise above the hilltops and began to fill the homes and streets of the town with a blinding fog of coal, coke, and metal fumes. At first, cars and trucks tried to creep along with their headlights lit, but by midday, traffic came to a standstill as drivers could no longer see the street. Arnold Hirsch, a World War II veteran then just beginning his half-century as the town's leading attorney, watched the gathering fog from his Main Street office. "The air looked yellow, never like that before. Nothing moved. I went over to Seventh Street and stood at the corner of McKean, looking down toward the river, and you could just barely see the railroad tracks. Right there on the tracks was a coal-burning engine puffing away. It issued a big blast of smoke that went up about six feet in the air and stopped cold. It just hung there, with no place to go, in air that did not move." The sturdy people of Donora were not perturbed. On Friday afternoon, the town's annual Halloween parade took place under a spooky haze. Children's costumes appeared and disappeared in the mist as the parade moved the two blocks down Main Street. My mother remembers it as a ghastly sight, but it fit the occasion. "Of course we all went," she told me later. "This fog was heavy, but there was only one Halloween every year. Only this time we could not see much." People could not see their own feet. Within days, nearly half the town would fall ill. Donora did not abandon its routines easily. The high-school football team, the Dragons, practiced kickoffs in preparation for the next day's home game against their great rivals, the Monongahela Wildcats. Jimmy Russell, the head coach, had to yell "Kick!" so that the receiving team would know the ball was in the air. The football game between Donora and Monongahela went off as scheduled. The entire town turned out for pep rallies and parades, with strutting drum majorettes leading the black-and-orange-uniformed marching band. The spectators often lost sight of the ball and could only guess from the referees' whistles when to cheer. When Donora's star tight end, Stanley Sawa, was ordered by the public-address system in midgame to "Go home! Go home now!" some in the stands thought it was a prank. Still in his uniform, with his helmet in his hands, Sawa raced up and down the hills to his family's home at the bottom of Fifth Street. He dashed into the house. "What's going on?" he huffed. "Why'd you make me leave the game?" "It's your dad," a neighbor told him. "What are you talking about?" Sawa demanded. "Where is he?" "In there, with the doctor," came the reply. "It doesn't look good." The elder Sawa, who earned his living lifting massive loads of coke and iron ore, had been brought home from the mill, short of breath, dizzy, thinking he only needed to lie down. By the time Stanley arrived, his father had already died. Monongahela won the game, 27 to 7. Spectators leaving the field quickly learned that by 10 that morning, nine people had died. Within 24 hours the number would be up to 18. Arnold Hirsch had tried to attend the game. "My brother Wallace and I decided we would walk up the Fifth Street steps. ... When we finally got to the top of those steps on our way to the game, we simply could not take another step. We did not say another word to each other. We could barely talk. We turned and headed straight home." When they got there, they found their mother in distress. "My mother, who had not been well for years, just could not catch her breath," Hirsch recalled. Donora had eight doctors at the time, all of whom made regular house calls. This time, however, no one would come. "I called Doc Rongaus, and he said he just could not make it. He said, 'The whole town is sick. Even healthy fellas are dropping. Get your mother the hell out of town!'" The Hirsches drove into the Allegheny Mountains away from the fog. Arnold's mother had come to Donora in 1920 as a healthy teenage bride. Both of her parents, who lived elsewhere, survived to almost 100. By the time her two children were grown, she was an invalid with a weak heart and serious breathing difficulties. She died two years after the smog, having barely reached her fifties. When I visited him in 1999 at an old-age home, Doc Rongaus told me that folks who made it to Palmer Park seemed to recover. The park sat high on a hill and was one of the few green places near the town, probably because the fumes from the mills did not regularly sweep over it. "My brother and I hauled women and children in horse-drawn wagons up to the park. Soon as we got them above the smog, they would get much better." The folks who ran the mills stuck to their routine. The whistles that kept the daily rhythms of the town shrieked on schedule, and the shifts that kept the plants running 24 hours a day did not cease. Although many people whispered that the mills had put something strange into the air, the superintendent of the zinc works, Michael Neale, knew that his mill was doing nothing unusual. That weekend, the enormous volume of telephone calls created a five-hour wait before frantic relatives could speak to local residents. Roger Blough, then chief counsel of American Steel and Wire and later its CEO, finally reached Neale at 3 Sunday morning to tell him to "dead fire" the furnaces, without zinc ore. A zinc furnace, like a coke oven, cannot be allowed to stop; once cooled, it can never be restarted. Dead firing would protect the equipment while reducing the plant's emissions. Resentful of the interference and unconvinced there was a problem, Neale only complied after a group of company-hired chemists arrived at 6 that morning, some hours after he had received the order to reduce operations. It was Walter Winchell, with that voice that resonated importance and certainty, who made Donora famous. "Good evening, America," he said in his national radio broadcast that Saturday night. "The small, hard-working steel town of Donora, Pa., is in mourning tonight as they recover from a catastrophe. People dropped dead from a thick killer fog that sickened much of the town. Folks are investigating what has hit the area." But, he had already given the answer many would come to accept: It was a "killer fog," a freak of the weather -- an act of G_d. By the time the fog began to ebb that Sunday, the local funeral home had run out of caskets. Still, the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette reported, "The citizenry maintained an attitude of outward calm which was surprising to observers. ... Here and there on the streets the youngsters continued their games of touch football and rode their bikes." Rains on the morning of November 1 washed the skies of whatever had hit the town. The day after the funerals for most of the victims, Dr. Joseph Shilen, a county medical official, filed a report with the Pennsylvania Secretary of Health recommending that the zinc works be reopened. The incident, he wrote, was unlikely to recur. Asked to investigate the smog, John J. Blumfield, deputy head of industrial hygiene for the Public Health Service, refused, calling it "a one-time atmospheric freak." What happened in Donora was not freakish, nor was it the first time that winds and weather combined with industrial fumes to kill so many that the deaths could hardly be counted. Neither Donorans nor many others knew that in 1930, in the Meuse Valley of Belgium, dozens of people had died within days of a smoky fog. Like Donora, the city of LiËge sat on a series of steep hills around a river valley, surrounded by metal mills and smelters. The conditions were similar: heavy fogs, lots of fumes from the mills, and workers who depended absolutely on the mills to feed their families. One Belgian investigator painstakingly demonstrated that fluoride gases were the likely cause of the devastation. Sulfur, he pointed out, in heavy doses leaves distinct marks on the lining of the lungs, but fluoride gases do not. They pass right into the bloodstream and attack the heart and other organs, without marring the nasal passages, throat, or lungs. The lungs of those who died in LiËge were clean. The world in which we live and work is not an easy or elegant place to study. When it comes to studying the impact of the environment on health, epidemiology remains a blunt and inexact instrument. In contrast to the precisely metered world of clinical trials of drugs, the environment in which people actually live is complex, unyielding of its secrets, and generally uncooperative. People outside of these controlled trials seldom know what they've been exposed to even recently, let alone in the critical weeks just before and after their birth. Epidemics, which are by definition brief and localized, sometimes end before anybody can come in to study them. Sometimes we don't ask the right questions, or we ask them in such a way that the answer remains unobtainable. Even worse, sometimes the right questions are asked and answered, but the news remains locked away in someone's private files or is written so abstrusely, and published so obscurely, that it might as well not exist at all. For Donora, as for LiËge, the important questions never got asked. Information critical to figuring out what went on remained hidden, sometimes in full view. As a result, the right things never got counted. After the smog, a brief campaign erupted against the zinc mill, led by folks outside Donora. Abe Celapino, a prosperous farmer and restaurant owner from across the bridge in Webster, whose cows and chickens had died, joined forces with the Monessen Daily Independent in calling for the mill to be relocated to a desert area. The editor in chief remarked that this might soon be unnecessary: The mill was creating its own desert area where it stood. Dr. Bill Rongaus, the only member of the borough council at the time who was not employed by the mills, pointed out that the zinc mill was likely to account for the sudden sickness. "The fog was in Monessen, too," he told the Donora Board of Health, "but it didn't kill people there the way this did. There's something in the air here that isn't found anywhere else." In the month that followed, calls for major studies of the town were rebuffed by people who did not want to know the answer, and others who feared what it would ultimately mean for the town's work force. The steelworkers' union, not realizing it was putting jobs at risk, offered $10,000 for a study that would explain the sudden deaths. The study, though it was not started for two months and began only after the mill had switched from coal to natural gas in some critical departments, was suitably ambitious. The first folks in were the medical experts. Half the homes in Donora were surveyed by nurses with questionnaires. Then the pathologists mounted an intensive study of the 20 who had died during the fog itself. They looked into each lung, each heart, and every other tissue that could be stained and assembled. A preliminary report by the Public Health Service, full of details of blood tests and other procedures and illustrated with copious X-rays and slides of lung tissue, came out within a year, but no final report followed. The detailed medical histories the nurses gathered have never been found. One eyewitness report from a medical expert paints a convincing picture of fluoride-gas poisoning. "Listening to the affected chest, nothing could be heard. Occasionally inspiratory and expiratory wheezes would be heard in the asthmatics, but in the healthy chest nothing at all. It was as though the respiratory apparatus was paralyzed. Many were cyanotic [blue], and apprehensive not knowing what had happened." This expert did not identify a cause, but he could easily have been describing the clean lungs of the deceased at Liège. A Philadelphia chemist brought in to study the problem, Philip Sadtler, speculated that the toxin came directly from the mills. Within months of the disaster, he reported that he had found over 1,000 parts per million of fluoride in an air-conditioning unit from Donora. Blood taken from those who died showed 12 to 25 times the normal levels of fluoride. Their lungs, Doc Rongaus recalled some 50 years later, looked fine at autopsy. The few investigators who warned that all this was not merely bad weather were dismissed. About a year after the inconclusive Public Health Service report was issued, a candid critique appeared in Science magazine, on January 20, 1950. Clarence A. Mills, a physician from the University of Cincinnati, had been trying for years to generate support for studying the conditions of the Monongahela Valley. He wrote that just two years before the disaster, there had been no interest in such research. He asked, "Just what did their year's work, with a staff of 25 investigators, show?" The answer was pitifully little: "The most valuable part of their year's work -- analysis of poison output from the steel and zinc plant stacks -- remains unused and unevaluated in their written reports. They spent months analyzing the valley air for poisons, but failed to calculate the concentrations probably present during the killing smog. ... Had they made such calculation, they would have found that even one day's accumulation of the very irritating red oxides of nitrogen from the acid plant stacks would have caused concentrations almost as high as had been set as the maximum allowable for safety of factory workers exposed only for an eight-hour work day. At the end of four days of last year's blanketing smog, concentrations reached were probably more than four times higher than the 10 milligrams per cubic meter of air listed as the upper limits of safety! And the Donora people breathed the poisoned air not eight hours a day but for four whole days." "Let us hope that the Donora tragedy may prove such an object lesson in air pollution dangers that no industrial plant will feel safe in the future in pouring aloft dangerous amounts of poisonous materials," Mills wrote. "Let us hope that the Donora disaster will awaken people everywhere to the dangers they face from pollution of the air they must breathe to live. These 20 suffered only briefly, but many of the 6,000 made ill that night will face continuing difficulties in breathing for the remainder of their lives. Herein lies the greater health danger from polluted air -- continuing damage to the respiratory system through years of nonkilling exposure." It has a strange ring to it, "years of nonkilling exposure." The Public Health Service did not agree that the zinc works played any important part in the deaths. Despite independent tests showing that even 60 days later, air concentrations of fluoride gas were 10 times what was then considered safe, the Public Health Service team made no measurements of fluoride levels for itself and did not mention the possibility of fluoride poisoning in its preliminary report. In Donora itself, efforts to link the disaster to fluoride fumes and other metal fumes were fiercely contested. The Pennsylvania Department of Forests and Waters had complaints on file from farmers downwind of the zinc mill dating to 1915, but the Chamber of Commerce, according to Bill Rongaus, saw that these reports never surfaced. The first medical experts who came into Donora after the smog conducted all the proper clinical tests on the 20 who died right away. Following traditional approaches, they looked into each of the vital organs and all the other tissues that could be stained and assembled. They looked at each slide, each X-ray one at a time, and never put them all together. No measurements were made of pollution in Donora until two months after the fatal smog had ended. As Mills notes, no effort was made to reconstruct what had gone on during the episode. Worse, the experts never looked at the survivors. If they had, they would have learned that in the month after the smog had lifted, at least 50 extra people had died. The notion of "extra" deaths may seem strange. As my mother says, you only get one chance to die. But epidemiologists can, and routinely do, predict the number of people who should die in any given population in any given time period, and thus can tell if a group of deaths is occurring that should not. These patterns of dying are human lives with the tears removed, the literal bodies of evidence. In Donora, one in every three people got very sick during the smog. Even a decade later, the town's death rate was much higher than in surrounding towns. But no attempt was made to link these deaths to the smog, or to air quality in general. The few results that did emerge were all published in the Public Health Service's preliminary (and, as it turned out, final) report of 1949. The report, which Mills found so lacking, now sits in the offices of the few people in the world who are concerned about the matter. One of these is Robert K. Maynard, the adept and irreverent head of the Environment Program in central London. When he heard about my research on Donora, Bob showed me his collection of original maps of the area, lung slides, and other documents. "Here, you might find these amusing," he said, handing me a foot-tall stack of old reports and newspaper articles. "Let me know what you find out. It might come in handy. I could send you some photographs too if they'd be useful." I accepted Bob's offer and, about a month later, a heavy package arrived, full of pathology reports, autopsies, and lots of official documents. For two years, I sifted through these papers. When I finally found the key to Donora, it was something I had looked at countless times but never seen. A simple black-and-white map shows the homes of each of the 18 people who died in Donora by October 30, 1948, and the two who died shortly after. I transferred each death to a larger map that showed the hills and valleys, the streets, and the mills. These records had been sitting in various files for half a century. Plenty of people had turned their microscopes on them, but nobody had stepped back to see the pattern. It was not merely a sudden break of bad weather. It was foggy then, but the valley is still foggy today, and the fogs will continue for as long as warmer river water emits vapor into colder air. What killed the people in Donora was what many suspected but could never prove. Most of the deaths occurred in the parts of town that sat just under the plume that spewed within a half-mile circle of the zinc mill. Donora is a different place now. After the big strikes in the fities, the massive, inefficient mills shut down, leaving the town to cope with deteriorating schools and a crumbling tax base. Many of the men, unwilling to give up the homes they had so painstakingly built (or unable to sell them) began commuting 60 or even 100 miles a day to take jobs in other towns. The Monongahela, ever a poisonous brown, began to flow blue. On one of those lovely spring days, when the Monongahela basin looks impossibly green now, Arnold and Rina Hirsch walked with me up to the small, neatly kept Jewish cemetery where my grandparents are buried. It sits atop one of the prettiest bluffs in the area, with a panoramic view of the rolling river valley. "You see the beautiful trees and beautiful view we have today?" Arnold said to me. "There was nothing here for many years after the smog was over. There was nothing but clay on that hillside." In 1998, just about the time of the 50th anniversary of the disaster, an earnest high-school student named Justin Shawley got a monument set up. The State Historical and Museum Commission erected a five-foot-square bronze plaque near the center of the former steel mill as a memorial to those who died. The plaque says: Major federal clean air laws became a legacy of this environmental disaster that focused national attention on air pollution. In late October of 1948, a heavy fog blanketed this valley, and as the days passed, the fog became a thick, acrid smog that left about 20 people dead and thousands ill. Not until October 31 did the Donora Zinc Works shut down its furnaces -- just hours before rain finally dispersed the smog. It is a touching monument. The 50 people who died in the month following the smog are nowhere counted. The thousands who died over the following decade are nowhere counted. And there is no counting of the thousands whom Clarence Mills called the "nonkilled" -- all those who went on to suffer in various poorly understood ways. Standing there by the ruins of the old mill, I thought I understood, just a little, what Sol Filler must have felt on revisiting Thereisenstadt: These people are well intentioned. They are trying to commemorate, to remember, to atone. But they are not trying hard enough. Every single one of Bubbe Pearl's five children developed heart problems. None of their illnesses would ever be tied to where they grew up. They are not listed on any memorial to Donora's dead. My dazzling, athletic Uncle Len dropped dead at age 50 on a handball court in Southern California, years and miles away from the Monongahela River Valley. But he carried Donora with him in his heart -- and in other body tissues as well. By the time my mother reached the same age, a decade later, coronary-artery-bypass operations were available to keep her alive. She needed three of them. Aunt Gert required only two. Bubbe Pearl's tombstone sits in the lovely Jewish cemetery with its spectacular view of the river valley. When I was born she was still a fierce driver, but by the time my brother arrived, a year and a half later, she had become an invalid. She did not die during the smog of 1948 either -- the town erected no plaque for her -- but only some two dozen heart attacks later. The attacks were so common that they almost became a ritual. The room would go quiet, and my mother, the baby of the family, would steady her own mother by the arm and steer her to the bed. The heavy, mottled-green steel oxygen tank would be wheeled over, the valve turned on, and the gas mask pulled over Bubbe's nose and mouth. Her skin often matched the blue-white color of her hair. We would all wait for Dr. Levin. Dr. Levin, always calm, always sure. His arrival meant that everything would be all right. The night she finally died, he did not come. I could not stop crying. I had seen her nearly die so many times, I was sure it was a mistake. Devra Lee Davis, an epidemiologist, is a visiting professor of public policy at Carnegie Mellon University and a senior adviser to the World Health Organization. This essay is adapted from When Smoke Ran Like Water: Tales of Environmental Deception and the Battle Against Pollution, to be published next month by Basic Books and just named a finalist for a National Book Award. Copyright © 2002 by Devra Lee Davis. http://chronicle.com Section: The Chronicle Review Volume 49, Issue 9, Page B7
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Copyright © 2002 by The Chronicle of Higher Education