"The Fog" Berton Roueché

"It was the second smoke-contaminated fog in history ever to reach a toxic density. The first such fog occurred in Belgium, in an industrialized stretch of the Meuse Valley, in 1930. During it several hundred people were prostrated, sixty of them fatally. The Donora fog struck down nearly six thousand. Twenty of them— five women and fifteen men— died."

I get e-mail alerts from the Library of America about their story of the week. I don't have time to read them all, a sad state of affairs, but this one caught my attention. It is written by Berton Roueché who was one of the first to write good popular science, mostly about medicine. One of my favorite books is his "The Medical Detectives," a series of short pieces about investigations into medical mysteries in the 20th Century. I'm drawn to these sorts of stories, especially those set in earlier times when scientists worked without the benefits of current technologies.

"The Fog" tells of the week in October1948 when a temperature inversion caused the smog produced by the mills that supported the town to be trapped in the river value for six days, causing thousands to become ill and killing 20 people. The story appeared in "The New Yorker" in September of 1950. It is told in Roueché's general style that combines narrative with information from media and scientific reports. I'm not sure whether the personal accounts are fictionalized or not, but the clarity and persuasiveness of his writing make his works popular even now and together with other writers like Rachel Carson helped to bring important health issues connected to pollution and other environmental problems to the public.

I'm not sure if I had read this particular story before, but I had heard of Donora and the tragedy of this event. It is one thing to hear the facts, but Roueché's style introduces you to the specific people involved, their reactions and their feelings. Other popular science accounts that were very likely influenced by Roueché's work are "The Children's Blizzard" by David Laskin and "Isaac's Storm" by Erik Larson, which both tell the story of the state-of-the-art weather reporting around1900. Although neither of the last two books is about medicine, each of these authors is as good a science-storyteller as Roueché is.

There are differing accounts on whether this specific event was the impetus behind the clean air laws enacted in the 70s, but regardless it is a part of our environmental history that we should not forget.