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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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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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Still Fighting for Clean Air Today
“People would come to the town, and they would say, ‘What’s that smell?’ And people who lived here would say, ‘What smell?’ And my grandpa would say, ‘Well, it smells like money.'”
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Donora: The Birthplace of Clean Air
It took the assassination of President James Garfield in 1881 and the assassination plot on Grover Cleveland in 1894 for the Secret Service to beef up its presidential protection force. And it took a tragedy in little Donora, Pennsylvania, for the nation to legislate for clean air.
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Temperature Inversions and Deadly Smog
Common to all three tragedies were two key elements. First, large factories in each area had been spewing enormous amounts of pollutants into the air, the most deadly being sulfur dioxide. And second, Mother Nature came calling in the form of something called a temperature inversion.
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Death in Donora
On Tuesday October 26, the air over Donora became foggy from cool air being trapped beneath warmer air above in what meteorologists term a temperature inversion. Normally inversions last less than a day, but this one lasted a devastating five days. Within two days the fog had turned into a stinging, yellowish-gray shroud so thick…
