October 30 is the anniversary of the day that The Donora Smog Incident started to become fatal in 1948. It killed 20 people, and caused major health problems for thousands more.

The area was home to a zinc plant and a steel plant owned by US Steel, and the town’s sky was constantly blackened. Most people were proud of this fact, as they felt that it meant prosperity and progress. Wartime propaganda had also lent a sense of importance to the town, as the war needs for their products were great. The few who did want to reduce the pollution were told that it was economically unfeasible.

On the 27th, a temperature inversion happened, which trapped the smog at ground level. Nobody thought much about the increased air pollution, as temperature inversions were common in this town.

Life continued as normal. The planned Halloween parade took place, and the mills continued to run day and night. What wasn’t normal was the length of the inversion. The pollution continued to build up in the town for the next 4 days. The hospitals soon began to fill up, and people started dying. The local fire chief worked tirelessly to supply oxygen to those who needed it most, depleting all the oxygen of his own fire department as well as neighbouring towns. The smog was bad enough that he had to scrape his vehicle along the curb, navigating by sound. It wasn’t until the following day that the mills were shut down. The capitalists didn’t believe that there was a connection between the mills and the deaths and resisted. Later that day, a storm came in to clear the inversion and saved the lives of thousands. Later autopsies would show lung damage similar to that of lungs damaged in chemical warfare.

In the aftermath of this real life horror story, US Steel immediately started damage control. The first investigators were allegedly run out of town at gunpoint. But knowing that this was unsustainable in the long run, the company instead “cooperated” with the US Public Health Service (USPHS) investigation. They did the job they were paid to do. They noted dangerous pollutants from the mills, but ultimately placed most of the blame on the weather, and noted other sorts of pollution as well. US Steel was happy to state that the smog was an Act of God. They paid a small settlement as a gesture of their generousity, and the oligarchs considered the matter closed.

However, the story doesn’t end here. The American Smelting and Refining Company (ASARCO) was concerned about these events, and wanted to squash complaints about their own factories before anything like this happened to them. So they hired the Harvard School of Public Health to show the harmlessness of breathing sulfuric acid and sulfur dioxide. Unfortunately for them, Mary Amdur took on the job. She modelled the physiological effects and showed just how harmful they were. The oligarchs were horrified. They pulled funding, they threatened her to not release the paper, and ultimately they got her fired from Harvard. She was right though. She based her 40 year career on that research. Her refusal to be quiet is why we have the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) and the Clean Air Act today.

But never forget that the US oligarchs would make more money if the EPA didn’t exist. Efforts are still being made to undermine it today.