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Health Risks of Wildfire Smoke: New Study Insights
We know a lot about the effects of industrial smoke on health, but not much on wildfire smoke. Here’s why wildfires can be so fatal, even years later.
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Air Pollution Crisis: The Risks of Regulatory Rollbacks
What effects will Trump’s continued rollbacks of air pollution control regulations have on our health?
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What Happened to Residents’ Health Long After the Donora Death Fog?
“Our scientists tell us that the Donora episode was a rare phenomenon. We hope and pray it will never recur. This study by the Public Health Service into the Donora episode, the most exhaustive ever made on a problem in air pollution, is a step toward positive assurance that such a thing will not happen…
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From Boom to Bust: What Happened to Little Webster?
Cuddled along a bend in the Monongahela River in southwestern Pennsylvania, across from the industrial town of Donora, Webster once boasted a population of about two thousand. Anyone traveling up the Mon around the turn of the twentieth century would have seen a charming village at the base of
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What Happens to Residents’ Health When a Coke Plant Closes?
Just south of Careopolis, Pennsylvania, the Ohio River splits at the northernmost tip of a long skinny island and joins together again about five miles later. The island, Neville Island, contained at its southernmost tip the Shenango Coke Works, a sprawling industrial complex built around 1930. Shenango processed coal for steel mills and had been…
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One Woman’s Story of the Deadly Smog
When you write a true story of an event, you always gather information you’d like to include in the final version but just can’t. Such was the case with one of my interview subjects for my book, Donora Death Fog: Clean Air and the Tragedy of a Pennsylvania Mill Town. I interviewed Donora native Edie…
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What That “It’s My New Book” Feel Feels Like
Seeing and feeling your newly printed book isn’t the same as saving someone’s life, but it’s close.
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Meet the Heroic Docs of the Donora Smog Disaster of 1948
If you’ve read anything about the Donora smog of 1948, you’ve probably read about how the town’s doctor’s traveled on foot or by car around Donora and Webster during the smog, doing whatever they could to prevent residents from suffocating. Let’s get to know five of those heroic physicians: DeWees Brown, Herbert Levin, Ralph Koehler,…
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Meet the Toxicologist Who Nailed the Smelter Industry After the Donora Smog
The full story of the Donora smog disaster could not be told without two names popping into the forefront, those of Philip Drinker and Mary O. Amdur. Drinker had famously invented the “iron lung” for victims of polio, principally children. Polio, more accurately called poliomyelitis, is an infectious disease caused by the poliovirus. Victims who…
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Did US Steel Officials Know Dangers of Asbestos Used in Cement City?
Why were asbestos shingles used in Center City? Didn’t US Steel know the dangers?
