PA CHD Commemorates Donora: the Worst Pollution Disaster in US History
The Pennsylvania Chapter of CHD was in the state capital with collaborative organizations Fluoride Free PA and Move Past Plastics on Tuesday, October 31st to commemorate a real horror, the US Steel deadly smog disaster of 1948.
It was 75 years ago this week when the US Steel Zinc Works’s smoke stacks filled the Monongahela River Valley, 24 miles southeast of Pittsburgh, where the towns of Donora and Webster are situated. For four days, there was a rare thermal inversion. By Halloween Eve, the third day the smog blacked out the town, people began dying. By the end of Halloween, when a rain helped clear the smog, 20 people had perished and hundreds were hospitalized. 57 in all died in close temporal relationship with the exposure. Autopsies recorded lethal levels of fluoride, a chemical element we now know is analogous to the effect of lead in the environment.
The Donora Smog was an influential incident demonstrating to Americans that exposure to large amounts of pollution in a short period of time can cause death, injury, and handicap. The event helped launch the clean-air movement in the United States, whose apex came in the form of the Clean Air Act of 1970, which required the United States Environmental Protection Agency to develop and enforce regulations to protect the general public from environmental contaminants.
Fluoride Free PA’s Beverly DeCer opened the press conference with a video statement by Senator Camera Bartolotta, whose district encompasses Donora.
Ms. DeCer spoke about the cover-up engineered through a commission set up by the National Public Health Service, which found the cause of deaths to be inconclusive. Donora was also a wake-up call on the collusion between government agencies and industry. She spoke to the autopsy reports that confirmed fatal levels of fluoride in the blood of the victims.
Tamela Trussell of Move Past Plastics talked about the ubiquity of PFAs as forever chemicals in our air, water, and bloodstreams. The F in PFAs is fluorine, the deadly element that makes up all fluoride compounds. Fluorine is a neurotoxin and is not safe at any dose for the developing minds of children and fetuses.
Vince Feldman, Chapter Coordinator for PA CHD, spoke last about the current status of legal proceedings against the EPA. Fluoridation of public water supplies has been a controversial issue since the inception of this practice, which corresponds with the Donora era. The regulation of fluoride in our water is a textbook case of how our public health agencies torpedo science at the administration level. EPA executives ignored the agency’s scientists and the weight of science to push for ever higher limits of exposure to fluoride.
The EPA is being sued under the Toxic Substances Control Act (TSCA) of 1976 by several non-profit groups. The case has been going on for 8 years, propelled by delaying tactics from the EPA’s attorneys. The judge has had to reprimand the defense’s attorneys repeatedly as they have struggled to defend the indefensible. The judge has deferred to the public health agency so far. US courts give them tremendous leeway on issues of public health. The judge allowed the EPA to request a delay in 2020 until a report was finalized by the National Toxicology Program.
This report was ready for release 16 months ago but was being held up at the United States Public Health Service Commissioned Corps by Admiral Rachel Levine. The judge, after a demand to see the draft report, was given a redacted version to review last year. The judge has scheduled a final hearing in this case for the end of January. We expect the court to force the EPA to outlaw water fluoridation, but we will be interested to see what further tricks the EPA has up its sleeve.