ABSTRACT
Case study The quiet city of Donora, Pennsylvania, was in for one horrific Halloween. On Halloween night, 1948, the “Donora death fog” descended like a phantom upon this sleepy steel-company town. When it cleared 6 days later, 20 people were dead, another 50 were dying, and hundreds would live out their days with permanently damaged lungs. An investigation indicated that one-third of the town’s 14,000 residents were affected. A local physician testified that had the smog continued another evening, “the casualty list would have been 1000 instead of 20.” A decade later, Donora’s mortality rate remained significantly higher than that of the neighboring areas.
