Located on the Monongahela River some 30 miles south of Pittsburgh, Donora sits nestled in a narrow valley, with cliff walls rising over 400 feet on either side. The question now is whether the lesson stuck.īefore Carnegie Steel made its way to Donora, the town was a small farming community. Donora taught Americans a powerful lesson about the unpredictable price of industrial processes. That battle has continued throughout the 20th century and into the 21st, with short-term economic interests often trumping long-term consequences. But in doing so, it pitted industry against the health of humans and their environment. 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. The 1948 Donora smog was the worst air pollution disaster in U.S. If not for the fog lifting when it did, Rongaus believed, “The casualty list would have been 1,000 instead of 20.” It wasn’t until the rain arrived at midday on Sunday that the fog finally dissipated. Hundreds flooded the hospitals, gasping for air, while hundreds more with respiratory or cardiac conditions were advised to evacuate the city. The funeral homes ran out of caskets florists ran out of flowers. Within days, 19 more people from Donora and Webster were dead. On Saturday October 30, around 2 a.m., the first death occurred. William Rongaus carried a lantern and led the ambulance by foot through the unnavigable streets. And when terrified residents began calling doctors and hospitals to report difficulty breathing, Dr. The Donora Dragons played their habitual Friday night football game, but, their vision obscured by the fog, ran the ball rather than throwing it.
Citizens attending the Donora Halloween parade squinted into the streets at the ghostlike figures rendered nearly invisible by the smoke. 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.
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