Donora: A Look Back at the Worst Air Pollution Disaster in US History

Tuesday, November 12, 2024, 6-7:15pm (Eastern)

~ Sylvan Stool Lecture ~

Andy McPhee, RN (Independent Scholar)

Mortician Rudolph Schwerha had already picked up two bodies in the dense fog. When he finally returned to the funeral home he found his wife, Helen, waiting at the door. “Before she spoke,” recalled Schwerha, “I knew what she would say. I thought, Oh, my God—another! I knew it by her face. And after that came another. Then another. There seemed to be no end. By ten o’clock in the morning, I had nine bodies waiting here.”

What was happening? “We didn’t know. I thought probably the fog was the reason; it had the smell of poison. But we didn’t know.”

Schwerha’s gut sense proved sadly accurate. A heavy fog had descended over Donora, a small steel and zinc mill town along the Monongahela River about 30 miles south of Pittsburgh. It was Halloween weekend in 1948, and before the weekend had ended 21 people would perish from the toxins concentrated in the fog, toxins that came mostly from the zinc mill at the north end of town. It was the worst air pollution disaster in US history, and it would prompt the legislation we know today as the Clean Air Act.

Join author Andy McPhee for a presentation about the town, its mills, and the smog that literally changed the quality of our air. Andy McPhee is a retired registered nurse and educational healthcare publisher, as well as the author of six books, most recently Donora Death Fog: Clean Air and the Tragedy of a Pennsylvania Mill Town, published by the University of Pittsburgh Press in 2023. The book provides the most complete and comprehensive accounting of the smog ever written. He is working on a book tentatively titled Bloodletting, Body Snatching, and the Doctors' Riot of 1788. McPhee lives in Saint Petersburg, Florida, with his wife and two dogs.

This lecture was recorded. You can find the recording at this link; the lecture proper starts at 15:45 (15 minutes and 45 seconds).

The C.F. Reynolds Medical History Society thanks its dues-paying members and the University of Pittsburgh Center for Bioethics and Health Law for its support of the continuing relevance of medical history in our world.