Epigraphs Note on Terminology Acknowledgments Introduction

March 18, 1934, Society Section, p. 11. Also, H. O’Conner, Mellon’s Millions
(New York: Blue Ribbon Books, 1933).
19. Bassett, “Air Pollution in Donora, PA.”
20. Snyder, p. 71. Also, author interview with Bill and Gladys Shempp.
21. K. E. Roholm, “The Fog Disaster in the Meuse Valley, 1930: A Fluorine Intoxication,”
J. Hygiene and Toxicology (March 1937), p. 126. Also, W. S. Leeuwen,
“Fog Catastrophe in Industrial Section South of Liege,” abstracted in J. Ind.
Hygiene, vol. 13, no. 7 (September 1931), pp. 159–160 (abstract section).
22. Sadtler gathered vegetation from across the region, tested it, and found that
fluoride pollution was endemic and serious. “Buttonwood leaves had anywhere
up to twelve hundred parts per million of fluorine,” Sadtler noted.
Further afield there was much less fluoride in the environment. “To get clean
air with no fluorine damage, I had a friend who was a professor at Penn
State University and he picked up leaves for me and they had ten parts per
million,” Sadtler said. Author interview.
23. Although coal was a source of fluoride, this knowledge was poorly disseminated.
(Francis Frary announced the discovery to the Air Hygiene Foundation
in 1946, as we saw in chapter 8.) Roholm makes no mention of coal in
his discussion of the Meuse Valley disaster, for example. And the role that
fluoride from coal may have played in the London smog disasters is almost
entirely ignored.
24. K. E. Roholm, Fluorine Intoxication: A Clinical-Hygienic Study, with a Review
of the Literature and Some Experimental Investigations (London: H. K. Lewis
and Co. Ltd, 1937), chapter 13.
25. When the senior U.S. Steel metallurgist Glen Howis, who was born in Donora,
had a routine medical exam before attending Penn State, a college doctor
told him, “I can always tell you boys from the valley from the looks of your
X-rays. Your lungs are always clouded,” Howis recalled. Author interview
in Donora.
26. The U.S. steel industry emitted 64,600 tons of fluoride in “1968 or 1972,”
according to EPA figures, cited by the Canadian National Research Council,
NRCC #16081, ISSN 0316-0114. “Coal for power” is next at 26,000 tons,
phosphate rock processing at 21,200 tons, and then aluminum smelting, at
16,230 tons. See similar data in “Summary Review of Health Effects Associated
with Hydrogen Fluoride and Related Compounds” (U.S. Environmental
Protection Agency, December 1988). For characterization of fluoride
as “worst,” see citations for fluoride toxicity and damage in chapter 15. For
example: “From 1957 to 1968, fluoride was responsible for more damage
claims than all twenty other air pollutants combined.” N. Groth, “Air Is
Fluoridated,” Peninsula Observer, January 27–February 3, 1969. See also
chapter 8, citations on lawsuits against the steel industry, and chapter 15’s
reference to fluoride’s synergistic potential to worsen the toxicity of such
pollutants as sulfur dioxide.
27. For fluoride’s chronic health effects in Donora, see account of resident Devra
Lee Davis, When Smoke Ran Like Water (New York: Perseus Press, 2002).