My wife grew up in a town just 13 miles away and she never heard of it either. In her defense, the event happened a few decades before she was even born.
I learned that the Donora Death Fog was a historic air inversion resulting in a wall of smog that killed 20 people and sickened thousands in Donora, Pennsylvania, a mill town on the Monongahela River, 24 miles southeast of Pittsburgh. On October 26, 1948, effluents from the town’s factories -- including suphur dioxide, fluoride, carbon monoxide, and dusts from assorted heavy metals -- were trapped by an air temperature inversion that enveloped Donora’s residents in a deadly haze for five days. It was estimated that one-third to one-half of the town's population of 14,000 residents had been sickened.
A historic marker in Donora reads:
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.Sixty years later, the incident was described by The New York Times as "one of the worst air pollution disasters in the nation's history."
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