By Lorraine Boissoneault, Smithsonian Magazine,
SMITHSONIANMAG.COM, OCTOBER 26, 2018

Steel and zinc industries provided Donora residents with work, but also robbed them of their health, and for some, their lives. The Donora Smog of 1948 began on October 27 and lasted until October 31, when rain cleared the combined smoke, fog and pollution that had become trapped over the town.

The yellow fog arrived five days before Halloween in 1948, swaddling the Pennsylvania city of Donora and the nearby village of Webster in a nearly impenetrable haze. Citizens attending the Donora Halloween parade squinted into the streets at the ghostlike figures rendered nearly invisible by the smoke. The Donora Dragons played their habitual Friday night football game, but, their vision obscured by the fog, ran the ball rather than throwing it. And when terrified residents began calling doctors and hospitals to report difficulty breathing, Dr. William Rongaus carried a lantern and led the ambulance by foot through the unnavigable streets.

On Saturday October 30, around 2 a.m., the first death occurred. Within days, 19 more people from Donora and Webster were dead. The funeral homes ran out of caskets; florists ran out of flowers. Hundreds flooded the hospitals, gasping for air, while hundreds more with respiratory or cardiac conditions were advised to evacuate the city. It wasn’t until the rain arrived at midday on Sunday that the fog finally dissipated. If not for the fog lifting when it did, Rongaus believed, “The casualty list would have been 1,000 instead of 20.”

The 1948 Donora smog was the worst air pollution disaster in U.S. history. It jumpstarted the fields of environmental and public health, drew attention to the need for industrial regulation, and launched a national conversation about the effects of pollution. But in doing so, it pitted industry against the health of humans and their environment. That battle has continued throughout the 20th century and into the 21st, with short-term economic interests often trumping long-term consequences. Donora taught Americans a powerful lesson about the unpredictable price of industrial processes. The question now is whether the lesson stuck.

https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/deadly-donora-smog-1948-spurred-environmental-protection-have-we-forgotten-lesson-180970533/

There’s a funny looking fog we get here,
a dangerous fog, no way for the wind to lift it.

A retired EPA man said we could have a Donora here
one of these nights, that fog could take our lives.

Julia Spicher Kasdorf’s documentary poem, “Along Hope Hollow Road, a Grandma Talks on the Phone,” draws a direct line from Donora’s legacy to the environmental worries of residents living near the material infrastructure of Pennsylvania’s natural gas industry today.

The speaker in the poem lives 250 feet from a compressor station that pressurizes for transport natural gas extracted from the Marcellus Shale region of Pennsylvania, where concerns about the environmental and health impacts from hydraulic fracturing (“fracking”) have been much discussed.

In the midst of Pennsylvania’s fracking boom, Kasdorf and photographer Steven Rubin traveled extensively through shale communities.

In these pages from Kasdorf’s writing journal, kept during her travels, she explores Donora’s legacy of pollution and the economic conditions today, decades after the closure of the steel and zinc plants. Her notes would later be turned into a poem, “St. Nicholas of Donora, PA” and published in Shale play: poems and photographs from the fracking fields, from Penn State University Press.

Items courtesy of Julia Spicher Kasdorf, Notes from Shale Play project, 2012-2017

Julia Spicher Kasdorf and Steven Rubin —
Shale play: poems and photographs from the fracking fields
University Park, Pennsylvania : The Pennsylvania State University Press, [2018]

ADDITIONAL INFORMATION — A gallery of images from the Shale Play project can be found on photographer Steven Rubin’s website at: https://www.stevenrubin.com/project/shale-play/.

NOTE: The Penn State library has mounted an on-line exhibition titled “Earth Archive.” Among the materials are historic photos from Donora and also my notebook from Shale Play. It is free to use here:

https://news.psu.edu/story/616345/2020/04/21/arts-and-entertainment/libraries-virtual-exhibition-highlights-human-impact

A FABLE FOR TOMORROW ……..

The first edition of Silent Spring was published eight years before the first Earth Day but was a catalyst for the environmental activism that informed it.

An examination, written for the general public, of the effect of pesticides, especially DDT, on the environment and human health, Silent Spring begins with a chapter entitled “A Fable for Tomorrow” in which a small town in America finds a “strange blight crept over the area and everything began to change.”

Birds and bees disappear, fish and baby piglets die off, plants wither, and “the farmers spoke of much illness among their families.” Spring comes, but without an abundance of life.

Carson, born in Springdale, Pennsylvania, worked as a marine biologist for what would become the US Fish and Wildlife Service before she dedicated herself to writing full time.

In an interview, she remarked, “Man’s attitude toward nature is today critically important simply because we have now acquired a fateful power to alter and destroy nature. But man is a part of nature, and his war against nature is inevitably a war against himself.”

Carson died of breast cancer two years after the publication of Silent Spring.

>>> Rachel Carson, with illustrations by Lois and Louis Darling
Silent Spring, Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1962

From the Virginia Mercury, Sarah Vogelsong, April 22, 2020

Earth Day’s 50th birthday is looking like a quiet one.

Usually marked with trash pickups, drum circles and rallies, this year’s observances are considerably cramped by social distancing orders in place to prevent the spread of coronavirus. Celebrations across the state have been canceled or, in an ironic twist for a movement built around love for the physical world, transformed into virtual events.

Virginia’s first Earth Day, though, was nothing so tame. Centered on college campuses, the 1970 observance had been proposed by Democratic Sen. Gaylord Nelson of Wisconsin as a nationwide “teach-in” that would focus all Americans’ eyes on the lands, waters and air they had and had not been protecting.

Here’s how it unfolded in the commonwealth 50 years ago:

https://www.virginiamercury.com/blog-va/a-trash-orgy-tanning-and-a-hike-with-a-bearded-geologist-virginias-first-earth-day-celebrations/