Pennsylvania Halloween Horror of 1948: The Sinister Story of the Deadly Donora Smog Disaster

 On the day before Halloween in 1948, a Saturday, in the early afternoon the Donora Pennsylvania High School football team was defeated on its home turf, Legion Field,  by local rival Monongahela High School.  The final score was Monongahela 27 Donora 7.

Not a single pass was thrown during the entire game by either team.  But there was something far more odd, sinister and tragic than erratic play on the gridiron that both literally and figuratively overshadowed the field and the one hundred and fifty or so players and spectators who had gathered together that afternoon at Legion Field in suburban western Pennsylvania.

The Smog.

Speaking sixty-years later in 2008 to reporters from the Pittsburgh Gazette local resident Sam Jackson, who played in the football game for Monongahela High School remembered, “The smog was like a big cloud of yellowish mist hanging over the players.”

Donora resident Paul Brown, who had left work early from the U.S. Steel Company Mill where he worked on Saturday, October 30, 1948 in order to attend the football game told reporters, “It took a while to get up the hill to the game because it was so foggy.  I was sitting in the fourth row.  You could see them punt the ball, hear them kick it, but it would just disappear into the clouds.”

The Donora Smog, what the New York Times has since called, “One of the worst air pollution disasters in our nation’s history,” affected much more than just a high school football game in suburban Pennsylvania.

Before all was said and done, what became known as the “Donora Smog”, which began on October 27, 1948 and did not lift for more than four full days, finally dissipating sometime on the evening of Halloween October 31, would directly claim the lives of twenty people.

Over 5,000 residents of Donora, Pennsylvania out of a total of approximately 14,000 residents would become sick with everything ranging from upper respiratory infections and bronchitis to nausea and vomiting over the course of the four day Smog.

The Smog in Donora Night of October 30-31st

The Smog first began to settle over Donora, a suburb roughly thirty miles south of Pittsburgh, during the afternoon of Wednesday, October 27, 1948, right when most of the townspeople were outside and lining the main street to watch all the town’s school children march by in costume for Donora’s annual Children’s Halloween Parade.

The yellow smog settled over Donora at the start of the long Halloween weekend and it stayed in place like a yellow smokescreen for the next ninety-six hours.

At its height, on the night of October 30 and the morning of October 31, 1948, residents described the Donora Smog as an, “Impenetrable yellow haze.”

Driving became impossible and even walking around in public proved hazardous.  

The first death from the Smog occurred in the local Donora Hospital at just after 2 in the morning on Saturday, October 30, 1948.  Over the course of the next thirty-six hours nineteen more residents of Donora, and the neighboring town of Webster, would die as a direct result of the Smog.  

All the victims died from the onset of acute asthma, or the inability to breathe, a sort of yellow Smog induced asphyxiation and all of those who died in the immediate presence of the smog were either elderly or young children.

Hospitals in the area filled to capacity and many were turned away during the Donora Smog Disaster.  Residents were advised to flee the town and outlying areas during the height of the Smog by the local authorities via messages broadcast over their radios, but as driving  was impossible, these advisories simply couldn’t be heeded by anyone.

By Halloween night, Sunday, October 31, 1948 the local funeral parlor had run out of caskets for sale.

Phone calls flooded into doctor’s offices reporting various respiratory problems and difficulty breathing.

One brave soul, Dr. William Rongaus, carried a lantern through the streets of Donora and led ambulances through the town on foot so that medical personnel could reach the most severely ill victims of the Smog and transport them to the hospital where they could receive life saving oxygen.

On Halloween 1948 there was no sunrise to speak of in Donora, Pennsylvania.   The town was caught in the grips of a monstrous yellow Smog and the numbers of dead and dying were mounting ever higher.

Then, almost miraculously, before the sun was due to set that Halloween the Smog suddenly lifted.  As Dr. Rongaus, who had battled the effects of the Smog on foot the whole time, told reporters the day after the disaster ended, “If the fog hadn’t lifted when it did the casualty list would have been 1,000 or maybe more.” 

Steel Plant and Zinc Works

Located thirty miles south of Pittsburgh, on the banks of the Monongahela River, prior to the twentieth century Donora, Pennsylvania had been a small, quiet and rural farming community nestled in a valley of the Appalachian Mountains, with four-hundred foot high cliffs rising up on both sides of the town.

However, in 1902 an Andrew Carnegie owned steel factory, a factory for the United States Steel Company, known the world over as the famous U.S Steel, opened in the valley right outside of Donora.

The US Steel factory brought jobs, middle class affluence and more and more residents to the once rural valley of Donora, Pennsylvania.  By 1908, only six years after the factory’s opening, Donora was home to the largest concentration of railroad freight train traffic in the eastern United States.

And then, in 1915, a zinc mining works, known to locals as the Zinc Plant, opened up in Donora right next to Carnegie’s US Steel factory.

With steel fires burning, hazardous zinc mining producing tons of toxic waste and pollutants, and grotesquely high carbon monoxide emissions from the highly concentrated freight trains of Donora, officials from the federal government realized early on that, “Air pollution in and around Donora could pose a danger to public health.”

Consequently, in 1918 the American Steel and Wire Company of Donora was fined by the federal government for excessive air pollution at a time when such fines were all but unheard of, however, the fine was paid and no corrective action was ever pursued.

During the 1920’s local farmers had brought class action suits against US Steel due to the loss of crops and sickness caused to their livestock as a result of the pollution caused by the steel works and the nearby zinc plant, but US Steel was able to fight off the suits in court, and plans to upgrade the zinc work furnaces in order to have them produce less smoke were never implemented by 1948.

Freight Car Traffic and Pollution in Donora 1948

Given the high rate of pollutants, especially metallic particulate matter in the air above Donora in late October 1948, conditions were more than ripe for one of American history’s worst environmental disasters.

The American Steel and Wire Plant and the Donora Zinc Works emitted a deadly combination of poisonous gasses and highly toxic particulate matter into the air, and in October of 1948 all of those toxins became trapped in the sky just above Donora as the result of a most unfortunate and peculiar weather event called a temperature inversion.

A temperature inversion is when cold air is trapped in a bubble by a layer of warmer air that settles above it, causing the cold air beneath to become stagnant and still.  In the case of the Donora Smog Disaster this bubble, filled with metallic toxins, poisonous gasses in the form of a yellow smoke cloud became trapped above the town for four whole days as it settled down into the valley and had nowhere else to go.

To the residents of Donora, Pennsylvania, it simply became a yellow cloud of suffocation and death.

Author, historian and environmental activist Debra Davis in her work entitled: When Smoke Ran Like Water: Tales of Environmental Deception and the Battle Against Pollution wrote of the victims of the Donora Smog Disaster that, “If you looked at the x-rays of their lungs they looked like the survivors of poison gas warfare.”

Even a full decade after the Smog Disaster government investigators working on behalf of the commonwealth of Pennsylvania found that the early mortality rate and incidence of chronic respiratory illness among residents of Donora was twice that of residents from other nearby communities.

Average house prices in Donora dropped by more than ten percent within a year of the disaster.

But, at the time of the Smog Disaster, the vast majority of Donora’s 14,000 plus residents were employed either by the Steel Plant or the Zinc Works and these industries were the economic lifeblood of the community.  Loyalty to the mills was ingrained, almost from birth, into the mind’s of those who lived in Donora.

As Ms. Davis states in her work on the subject, “The majority of the town worked in the mills…any suggestion that there could be a problem with the mill itself, which was supporting them financially, was simply something that they could not entertain.”

So much so that it was reported in newspapers around the country that the first state government investigators sent to Donora to look into the Smog Disaster in November of 1948 were literally run out of town by people armed with handguns!

However, in conjunction with the state of Pennsylvania, by the end of 1948 an investigation was launched by the newly formed United States Public Health Service into the causes and results of the Smog Disaster.

In total twenty-five federal investigators were sent to Donora and the neighboring town of Webster to look into the disaster.  While there, government investigators interviewed residents, inspected crops, drew blood from livestock and took countless air samples in and around Donora.

The Federal Government’s official report on the Donora Smog Disaster was issued in October of 1949 almost exactly a year to the day of the suffocating yellow cloud’s onset.  In their report the United States Public Health service found that out of a total population of just over 14,000 individuals, no less than 5,000 residents of Donora had either died or become seriously ill as a result of the Smog Disaster.

However, despite all of the sobering statistics that they reported, the federal government stopped one step short of blaming either the steel plant, zinc works or air pollution in general for causing the deadly Donora Smog Disaster.

Rather, instead of directly blaming the air pollution itself, the government report blamed the relatively rare weather phenomena of a temperature inversion and the high cliffs that surrounded the town of Donora as being the primary causes behind the Smog Disaster of Halloween weekend 1948.

Despite the federal government’s reticence to overtly blame heavy metal production and air pollution itself for causing the Donora Smog Disaster of 1948 the incident did gain nationwide media exposure throughout the United States, and for really the first time in American history, Americans began to take a serious look at the harmful effects of air pollution on our rapidly urbanizing nation.

One article entitled simply “The Fog” published in The New Yorker in 1950 and written by celebrated medical journalist Berton Roueche was read by millions and brought home to many Americans the depth of the suffering experienced by the residents of Donora as a result of air pollution.

Soon a nascent “Clean Air Movement” which preached against the harmful effects of air pollution on people’s health and well-being began to spread and grow across the nation.  For the first time in history, as a direct result of the Donora Smog Disaster of 1948, American’s realized that short term exposure to large amounts of toxins and pollutants could have a harmful or even a fatal effect on otherwise healthy people.

In 1963, fifteen years after the Donora Smog Disaster, Congress passed the Clean Air Act which required that the United States develop and enforce federal regulations to help protect the general public from exposure to harmful amounts of airborne toxins and pollutants just like those that had caused the Donora Smog Disaster.

For nearly sixty years no one talked much about the Donora Smog Disaster.  Perhaps, the memories of that suffocating yellow haze that enveloped their town for four days in its deadly grasp were just too traumatic for many of the town’s aging and elderly residents who could still remember to ever speak about.

But then on the 60th anniversary of the disaster the memories of those who died, and all those who suffered during the Donora Smog Disaster, were forever immortalized when the town opened the Donora Smog Museum on the banks of the Monongahela River.

Today, that museum stands as a small and silent reminder to all who walk by of a terrifying  yellow haze that descended on a small Pennsylvania town in October 1948 and ended up changing the way we as Americans viewed our world forever…