What do you know about hazardous waste?: Killer Smog

Thursday, April 5, 2012

Killer Smog

What is the difference between fog and smog?

Well, fog is more of a thick mist rather than a cloud and smog is simply put: air pollution. It can be made from burning coal with soot particulates and sulfur dioxide as well as vehicle emissions.

Due to many cases of increased asthma, respiratory problems, and even death the EPA has created an Air Quality Index. You can check this out at AIRNow for a current AQI forecast for the U.S. I learned about this website from Dr. Franz in my Environmental Chemistry class and we were talking about ozone. You can also see the current ozone at this website as it also effects health.

http://www.rootsweb.ancestry.com/~engcbanb/memories/mem62.htm

Have you ever considered smog to be a serious problem?

Well, in my Environmental Geoscience class taught by Dr. KB, I learned about one fatal story that occurred in 1948 with the people of Donora, Pennsylvania who went through a unique experience called an air inversion. It was similar to normal smog events, but they lived inside of a valley. When air near the ground is cooler than the air above it, a reversal of normal atmospheric conditions occurs. A temperature inversion/change put a lid on Mon Valley and literally trapped all of the smoke coming from the zinc and steel mills. The citizens began to have less visibility to the point of not being able to drive or see their hands in front of their faces. Doctors would inject oxygen and then go to the next person. People would wait until the cart of oxygen came to their house. One fireman said "If you chewed hard enough, you could swallow it."

What a scary thought!

20 people died and more than 7,000/14,000 people were seriously sick and had permanent lung damage. The pollution was a cause of the many factories such as the Donora Zinc Works, which was a smelting operation containing large quantities of deadly, heavy metals such as carbon monoxide, sulfur, etc. The health problems were seen all the way back to 1918 because the facility had to pay off legal claims of health problem for neighbors and again in the 20s for loss of crops and livestock.

This case became a serious governmental change in how we assessed and dealt with threats from air pollution. Before this incident, no-one had seriously considered that air pollution was a problem and actually, during the investigation, the manufacturing companies in this valley were wrongly dismissed as the true problem as the source of the smog. This is because it is such a big money-making business and the owners probably owned much of the town already or at least the council members. Another reason why they didn't shut down the factories was that if they turned it off it would get cold and they would never be able to use it again. $$$ issue. The area must have been bare as emissions had killed almost all of the vegetation around the plant.

So how were they eventually saved? A cold front came in and mixed up the thick smog and brought in some clean and fresh oxygen. If it wasn't for that the situation would have been much worse.