Helen Stack woke up that foggy morning with a cough and sore throat and thought she must be developing a cold. She dressed and headed down the hill to her work as an office assistant for two of the town’s eight physicians, Ralph Koehler and Edward Roth. The attractive twenty-eight-year-old arrived before the doctors, as she typically did. The office looked dirty and was covered in a film of odd dust. “It wasn’t just ordinary soot and grit,” she explained. “There was something white and scummy mixed up in it. I almost hated to touch it, it was so nasty looking. But it had to be cleaned up, so I got out a cloth and went to work.”
With that task finished, Stack sat at her desk to sort through the mail, then lit a cigarette. It didn’t taste right. She took another puff and started coughing. Hacking. She felt nauseous. “I’ll never forget that taste,” she said. “Oh, it was awful! It was sweet and horrible, like something rotten. It tasted the way the fog smelled, only ten times worse. I got rid of the cigarette as fast as I could and drank a glass of water, and then I felt better.”
The fog was indeed worse than usual, darker than usual, but the next day’s annual Halloween parade was still on. From the office Stack could hear workers scurrying about, preparing the main drag, McKean Avenue, for the event. “I knew the committee wouldn’t be going ahead with the parade if they thought anything was wrong,” said Stack. “So I went on with my work, and pretty soon the doctors came in from their early calls, and it was just like any other morning.”
Ralph Koehler often looked out his bathroom window in the morning toward the mills and would watch as plumes of smoke from passing trains drifted into the sky. That morning, though, the morning of Friday, October 29, 1948, Koehler looked out and saw something different and unsettling. That morning, at about 8:30 a.m., a freight train was making its way north, slowly, through the dark, foggy morning. Something about it caught Koehler’s eye. “It was the smoke,” he said. “They were firing up for the grade and the smoke was belching out, but it didn’t rise. I mean it didn’t go up at all. It just spilled out over the lip of the stack like a black liquid, like ink or oil, and rolled down to the ground and lay there. My God, it just lay there!”
Koehler was a man of science, and at age forty-eight an experienced one at that. The sight of the train’s lethargic smoke provoked his anger. Well, goddamn, he thought to himself, and they talk about needing smoke control up in Pittsburgh! “I’ve got a heart condition,” he said later, “and I was so disgusted my heart began to act up a little. I had to sit down on the edge of the tub and rest a minute.” Koehler could not have imagined what the day had in store for him.
Throughout that Halloween weekend, residents of Donora, a small mill town along the Monongahela River in southwestern Pennsylvania, went about their daily lives as if nothing unusual was happening. The annual Halloween parade went on as scheduled, though people could barely see the floats through the thick, foul-smelling fog. The high school football game took place, as scheduled, between Donora and arch-rival Monongahela, a town that would later boast of having Hall of Fame quarterback Joe Montana among its ranks. Longtime Donora resident Paul Brown recalled, “You could see them punt the ball, hear them kick it, but it would disappear into the cloud.”
It wasn’t until mortician Rudolph Schwerha received a call at 2:00 a.m. Saturday morning that the weekend began to take on a cloud of despair. The call woke him from sleep, but he was accustomed to it. Schwerha had been a mortician for several years and had just been promoted to chief deputy coroner for the county in February. He did his best to comfort the caller and then sent his driver to pick up the body. “He was gone forever,” Schwerha remembered. “The fog that night was impossible. It was a neighborhood case—only two blocks to go, and my driver works quick—but it was thirty minutes by the clock before I heard the service car in the drive.” Just as the car pulled in Schwerha received another call. Someone else had died.
Surprised that two people would expire in such a short time, he decided that this time he had better go along with his driver. The second body was in Sunnyside, a community on the other side of the Monongahela River, too far for one man to drive in such weather alone. Traveling would prove not just difficult but dangerous as well. “The fog, when we got down by the mills, was unbelievable,” said Schwerha. “Nothing could be seen. It was like a blanket. Our fog lights were useless, and even with the fog spotlight on, the white line in the street was invisible. I began to worry. What if we should bump a parked car? What if we should fall off the road? Finally, I told my driver, ‘Stop! I’ll take the wheel. You walk in front and show the way.’”
They continued like that for two miles, a distance that might have seemed to them never-ending. Finally they reached Sunnyside, but so thick was the fog that they unknowingly passed the deceased person’s house. “I know that section like my hand,” Schwerha said. “So we had to turn around and go back. That was an awful time. We were on the side of a hill, with a terrible drop on one side and no fence. I was afraid every minute. But we made it, moving by inches, and pretty soon I found the house.” It was the house of a sixty-seven-year-old retired coal miner. Schwerha had no way of knowing then that the miner was the night’s third death, not its second.
“When we were ready, we started back,” Schwerha recalled. “Then I began to feel sick. The fog was getting me. There was an awful tickle in my throat. I was coughing and ready to vomit. I called to my driver that I had to stop and get out. He was ready to stop too, I guess. Already he had walked four or five miles. But I envied him. He was well, and I was awful sick. I leaned against the car, coughing and gagging, and at last I riffled a few times. Then I was much better. I could drive.”
When they finally returned to the funeral home, they found Schwerha’s wife, Helen, waiting at the door. “Before she spoke, 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.” Then he heard that two other funeral homes in town each had a body. Eleven people dead! thought Schwerha. 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.”
Donora had been home to steel and zinc plants since the turn of the century, when the town was founded. Toxic chemicals and gases had been spewing out of the factories’ smokestacks all day, every day, for decades. Donorans had become so accustomed to smoke and soot that they found the intensely dark fog that Halloween weekend not terribly unusual. “Remember,” said longtime resident Harry Loftus, “these guys stormed the beaches of Normandy. Do you think a little smoke is going to bother them?”
The fog, as they called it, had been hanging over Donora and its neighbor, a hamlet across the river called Webster, for four days. It was the result of a temperature inversion, the same weather event that causes morning fog in spring and autumn. This particular temperature inversion, though, was different; it hadn’t “blown off,” as typical inversions do, nor would it for two more days. In those six days twenty-one area residents perished and thousands were sickened.
The hospital in nearby Charleroi overflowed with patients struggling to breathe and quickly ran out of oxygen tents to treat victims. Firefighters in Donora ran out of oxygen tanks and had to send to neighboring towns for more. Doctors exhausted themselves shuffling almost blindly from house to house to give the sick a shot here, a prescription there. One physician all but succumbed himself before finally reaching home and sleeping a few hours, only to awaken and head out again to treat more patients.
The tragedy was finally announced to the nation by newsman Walter Winchell that Saturday night, the first time many people in Donora, along with their relatives, realized that this fog was different than any that had come before. The deaths that weekend forced the government to finally address a problem it had been struggling with for years—air pollution.
A year and a half after Donora, President Harry S. Truman organized the first-ever national conference on air pollution. The conference led directly to the Air Pollution Control Act of 1955, the precursor to the historic 1970 version. That version, heavily amended after 1955, was signed into law by President Richard M. Nixon and renamed the Clean Air Act, the name we know today.
Excerpted from Donora Death Fog: Clean Air and the Tragedy of a Pennsylvania Mill Town by Andy McPhee. Copyright © 2023 by Andy McPhee. By permission of The University of Pittsburgh Press. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.