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.The zincworkers whose toil at the white-hot furnace face was some of the dirtiestin Donora were mostly from northern Spain."Donora was a great Spanish town," remembered Bill Shempp." Theyused to have a festival out at Palmer Park every year and people came fromas far away as California and it would last for a week or so, and they wouldpractically camp out."Today a stroll through a wooded Donora cemetery whispers a memoryof the new industrial world those immigrants found.Birdsong spills uponthe gravestones, some marked with distinctive twin-horizontal Copticcrosses, etched with Slavic, Spanish, and Italian names.Coal barges stillpush up the Monongahela River.A train whistles in the valley below.Onone gravestone an engraved photograph of a young man in anuncomfortable-looking suit stares out from behind a glass panel like anicon, this grave a final resting place for a long-ago dream of that PromisedLand in western Pennsylvania.In Philadelphia that disaster weekend Philip Sadtler's father, SamuelSadtler, flipped through the pages of his Sunday newspaper.It was full ofspeculation that Harry Truman would lose the coming November electionto Republican presidential challenger Thomas Dewey.But as Sadtler read,his eyes lit on a short description of the terrible events in Donora.Time,Newsweek, and the New York Times all carried similar accounts of thetragedy.Scores of Donora's sick and injured were being evacuated by air toMyrtle Beach in South Carolina.As he read about the Donora events, Samuel Sadtler became sus picious.He recalled a similar disaster in Belgium some eighteen years earlier, whenfumes from metal-smelting and fertilizer factories had been trapped by atemperature inversion and had killed sixty-three people in the MeuseValley.Thousands more had been left ill with respiratory and heartproblems.Kaj Roholm and other scientists had reported that fluorideemissions from industrial plants 120 CHAPTER NINEin the Meuse Valley had caused the disaster.' There had been three zincplants in the valley.Roholm's book sat in Sadtler's library.He wanted hisson to go to Donora and investigate the situation."Father said, `That's fluorine, remembered Philip Sadtler."I said, `Well,so what Dad? I can't afford to go out there.But five days later Philip Sadtler stepped off the Donora train.Thesix-foot-tall Sadtler already had his own reputation as a talented scientistand air-pollution investigator.He had examined several big fluoridepollution cases just after the war in Ohio, Florida, New Jersey, andPennsylvania, including the so-called Peach Crop cases, linked to theManhattan Project (see chapter 5).Sadtler had also measured fluoridecontent in vegetation along the industrialized Delaware Valley and founddamage endemic and widespread.22 " There were at least ten thousandsquare miles of damage from fluorine.Most people did not know that wasgoing on," he said.Sadtler's train ticket to Donora was paid for by a group of crusadingFlorida farmers.They were suing phosphate fertilizer plants near the townof Bradenton, on Florida's southwest coast, claiming that fluoride airpollution was destroying their crops and their health.Thirty-eight-year-oldSadtler was their courtroom scientific expert.The Florida farmers hopedthat a verdict of fluoride poisoning in Donora might help their own courtcase and worried that the Donora deaths would be blamed instead on sulfurdioxide, a much less toxic pollutant that at the time was being generated inlarge volumes by the coal used to heat homes."The Bradenton farmers called and said, `Don't let them call it sulfurdioxide,"' Sadtler told me.They feared that if Pennsylvania's industrialistscould point the finger at sulfur dioxide produced by Donora's coal-burningcitizens, instead of industry's fluoride emissions, then there would be noone to blame for the disaster." All the culprits in the country at that timewanted to call it sulfur dioxide," Sadtler recalled.By blaming air pollutionon sulfur dioxide, the industrial polluters were safe; fluoride, on the otherhand, was much more likely to be blamed on metal smelters and manu-facturing plants, and could lead to convictions in court.'3 (Today thefluoride researcher and activist Mike Connett describes sulfur dioxide asthe Lee Harvey Oswald of air pollution.Like Oswald, sulfur dioxide is aconvenient scapegoat and, like Oswald, it is highly P ONORA 121unlikely that sulfur dioxide could accomplish all that it is blamed for.)Sadtler thought that the farmers were probably right.He had earlierinvestigated some big sulfur dioxide pollution incidents, and he feltthat the damage in Donora "sounded a lot worse than sulfur dioxideever caused," he said.Now, treading Donora's cobbled streets, Sadtler continued gath-ering clues.When the Donora townspeople talked, he watched theirmouths.Many had teeth that were badly mottled, he said.Sadtlerknew that the mottling the white blotches and chalky marks thatappeared on teeth was known as dental fluorosis.He knew that suchdental fluorosis was an indication that a community had been exposedto fluoride over a long period of time and was a cardinal sign offluoride poisoning.Scientists call such long-term and moderateexposure chronic.Larger acute exposures, on the other hand, such asburns or serious lung damage, are the sort of fluoride poisoning thatmight occur during an industrial accident.Sadtler even joked aboutthe dismal dental situation he found in Donora, where many workerswere entirely toothless."They did not have any tooth problem with theemployees in the smelter," Sadtler said, "because when they went towork they put their teeth in the locker.No tooth problem.But peopleoutside [the smelter] did have the mottling."As Sadtler approached the Donora town hall, more people passed.He heard several ugly hacking coughs.Respiratory disease such aspulmonary fibrosis, emphysema, and dyspnea (shortness of breath) isanother obvious sign of chronic fluoride poisoning." He soon learnedthat the mill town and the surrounding county had a notoriousreputation among local people and doctors, even within smoky,industrial Pennsylvania, for lung problems and respiratory disease.""There were lots of respiratory problems in the area," said the"Donora resident Gladys Shempp.Everybody was always sneezingand carrying on.But they took it for granted, that was just part of life
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