70th Anniversary of the Donora Smog Disaster: Deadly smog left legacy

Editor’s note: This is the first of a series covering the 70th anniversary of the Donora smog this week.

By KRISTIE LINDEN
klinden@yourmvi.com
The Donora Smog is an incident that lives in infamy, but it definitely did not start that way.
The Donora Historical Society and Smog Museum will commemorate the 70th anniversary of the disaster this week with several events.
Though it stands out as inconceivable today, most Donora residents hardly noticed the increased air pollution the morning of Oct. 27, 1948.
The day before, a temperature inversion settled over Donora. Warmer air trapped the colder air filled with pollution from the mills in town, offering the smog no escape.
But, initially, things didn’t seem all that different in Donora than any other day of the week.
“You could see street lights through something of a haze,” said Dr. Charles Stacey, retired Ringgold School District superintendent and smog survivor. “No one thought much about it because we’d had smoky, smoggy days in the past. This was just a little more intense. We thought it would blow over like every other one did by the middle of the day and the sun would burn some of it off, but it just didn’t happen that way.”
The American Steel and Wire Works added a zinc plant in Donora to galvanize the steel products to prevent rust in 1915. The mill stretched over nearly 3 miles along the bank of the Monongahela River.

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