Word: donora
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...morning of Oct. 26, 1948, at Donora, Pa., the skies delivered a deadly warning that man had poisoned them beyond endurance...
...Donora's doctors were soon besieged by coughing, wheezing patients complaining of shortness of breath, running noses, smarting eyes, sore throats and nausea. During the next four days, before a heavy rain washed away the menacing shroud, 5,910 of the town's 14,000 residents became ill. Twenty persons-and an assortment of dogs, cats and canaries-died...
...colder regions above, carrying much of man's pollution with it. Occasionally, a layer of warmer air forms above cooler air near the ground; the inversion acts as a lid, preventing the pollutants at lower altitudes from rising and dispersing. Inversions are no novelty, but what happened at Donora shocked public-health officials into an awareness that such layers pose a deadly threat to an increasingly industrialized and pollutant-producing society...
Chief culprits in the Donora, London and New York smog disasters were probably sulphur dioxide and sulphur trioxide, which, either in gaseous form or converted into sulphuric-acid mist, can irritate the skin, eyes and upper respiratory tract. Extreme exposure, such as might occur in an industrial accident, can do irreparable damage to the lungs-and even attack the enamel on teeth...
...subject on its tongue. The steel chieftains ponder it in their exclusive Duquesne Club; the middle managers anxiously debate it in the Bar D'Or at the Penn-Sheraton Hotel; the mill hands chew it along with pretzels and pistachios in beery saloons from Ambridge to Donora. The subject: the change that is coming over the United States Steel Corp. Behind the closed doors of its executive suites, the world's largest steelmaker is shaking through the greatest reorganization in modern U.S. business. On July 1 the giant that steelmen everywhere know as "The Corporation" plans to announce...