Word: smog
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...world will end with a cough, a wheeze, a mass gasp of emphysema. So it seemed last week, a bad week, as dirty air smothered cities around the earth. Millions of smog-choked city dwellers began to feel like canaries in coal mines-obliged to perish in order to warn others of potential disaster. Rarely before had man's dependence on the fragile biosphere been so dramatically illustrated on a global scale...
...polluted air hung like a filthy muslin curtain along the entire Atlantic Coast, from Boston south to Atlanta. Because of unusually stagnant winds and humid heat in the high 90s, Washington, D.C., was on the verge of the first smog alert in the capital's history. The hardest hit of all U.S. cities was New York (see following story), which declared a first-stage pollution alert and simultaneously reeled under a severe power shortage...
...Japan's domestic autos are still not equipped with emission controls. In Tokyo, a long and dreary rainy season was broken by a surge of windless warm weather that suddenly worsened the poisoned air. Bright sunlight reacted with suspended auto exhaust to produce a photochemical miasma called "white smog." One day a group of children playing in a schoolyard had trouble breathing and began collapsing; they were treated for smog poisoning. In five choking days, more than 8,000 people in Tokyo were treated in hospitals for smarting eyes and sore throats. Thousands more carefully stayed indoors or tried...
Belated Action. Stung by criticism as well as smog, Premier Eisaku Sato set up a central headquarters in Tokyo to coordinate efforts to deal with the pollution. City officials, meanwhile, rushed to complete what is ambitiously billed as "the world's quickest photochemical-smog warning system"-which means daily bulletins issued via radio and TV. So far, the smog is seeping across Japan faster than humans can chart it. On a hot, bright day last week, it reached Shikoku, smallest of Japan's four main islands, where more schoolchildren were suddenly afflicted with sore throats and eyes. Pollution...
...week's end the immediate crisis seemed to have passed. President Nixon, commenting on the inversion, found a silver lining to the yellow-gray smog: "In some ways, it was perhaps fortunate that the East Coast saw the problem in such a massive manner," he said. "Now we realize that we don't have much time left." Best of all, most New Yorkers did not blame nature for what was clearly a man-made mess. "If you live in your own smog," said a short-order cook, "you got to know it's yours, even...