Remembering the Toxic Air Disaster in Donora, Pa.

January 16, 2015
First published August 20, 2008

What was described as a killer fog blanketed the small company town in 1948. The killer fog was believed to be industrial fumes. When it was over, the local funeral home ram out of caskets. Jennifer Szweda Jordan visited Donora, Pa. to talk with survivors on what it meant then, and what it means today.

Here's how longtime residents of Donora, Pennsylvania described the air that filled their streets in the 1940s:

“You could, depending on the atmospheric conditions, taste the smog.”

“Walking down the street, the tears rolling down my face. because it burned, you know, it was full of sulfur.”

Most in this friendly town did not complain. They accepted it as a necessary part of industry. In this tiny community, a 40-acre zinc plant stretched across the river. Coke ovens burned constantly, and coal stoves heated the thousands of homes. Devra Davis writes about Donora in “When Smoke Ran Like Water: Tales of Environmental Deception, and the Battle Against Pollution.”

“Donora at that time burned as much coal in a single day, in the mills, as the entire city of Pittsburgh, a city that was 10 times bigger,” Davis says.

Late in October 1948, a cold air mass created a lid of the bowl of fumes in the Monongahela Valley town for five days, until rain cleared the air. Twenty people died, and 6,000 fell ill. Over the next month, another 50 would die. In all, 42 percent of the town’s 14,000 residents were sickened or worse.

Fireman Bill Shemp was there and  remembers how the situation worsened.

“The Mrs. and I, my wife Gladys, had been to a party. And as we came home we went down into this fog area, into the town, and the town was pretty well consumed, if you want to say it that way. We managed to just barely make it home,” he says.

Shemp’s home is a museum of fire-related antiques. In the collection is an 8-inch oxygen tank he hauled up steep hills to help the afflicted. He carried the 30-pound tank around the streets that night.

“To get approximately five blocks took me at least an hour--and hour and a half—to feel my way because I had to go along fences and curb lines and so on. I was like a wall of snow,” Shemp says.

There were too many coughing, dying residents for Bill Shemp to visit. After he administered oxygen at one home, family members blamed him for leaving their loved ones to die.

“They wanted to put a knife in my back for not staying with them,” Shemp remembers.

The disaster is historically significant because it helped usher in federal air quality measures. President Harry Truman cited Donora as an example of the need for a national air pollution conference that he convened in 1950. Some blame the legislation for the lack of jobs here. Paul Petro is among those who has mixed feelings about what transpired after the disaster.

“In 1963 this mill started to close. People deserve to breathe clean air. We all know that and—but I always felt that the government should help the industry,” Petro says.

Despite the federal legislation, Devra Davis says there are places where a similar threat exists today.

“In the rapidly developing world, particularly on mid-size cities in Asia and Latin America, they are using old technologies now. In the worst situations, there’s nobody counting the bodies, there’s nobody measuring the air and water,” Davis says. If these kinds of activities continue in those communities, they ultimately will come back to haunt us.”