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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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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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Donora, London, and the Politics of Smog
After the smog cleared out of the Mon valley that deadly October 1948, after Dr. William Rongaus’s pleas for people to leave town went unheeded, after nearly 6,000 area residents had been sickened and 20 people had perished during the smog or in the immediate aftermath, a 25-person team from the nation’s Public Health Service…
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Air Pollution Hotspots Around the World
Air pollution continues to kill people around the world.
