Cities: Western Wind, When Wilt Thou Blow?

From above, it looked like a dirty blanket enfolding the whole northeast. Pilots dipping from crystalline skies prepared abruptly to make instrument landings. In midmorning, motorists inched through the Stygian haze with smarting eyes and headlights ablaze. Skyscrapers were amputated at the midriff. Pedestrians in city streets gasped at the miasmal murk even as newspaper headlines screamed that their next breath might be a dose of poison.

From Boston to Baltimore, smog’s grey, grimy pall settled in for three days and nights, frightening residents with the specter of killer fogs such as those that had claimed up to 4,000 lives in London in 1952 and 240 in New York a year later. All the elements for another lethal siege were at hand.

Trapped Poison. An inversion layer of warm air domed over the region the day before Thanksgiving, trapping the dirty air beneath it. Westerly winds, which normally whisk away ‘the 17.6 million lbs. of pollutants that New York City alone spews into the air each day, were nowhere to be found. By Thanksgiving, despite the holiday inactivity, New York’s pollution reached five times its normal level of noxious carbon monoxide from cars, soot and fly ash from chimneys and potentially deadly sulphur dioxide from soft fuel oil and coal fires.

Officials of New York City’s Air Pollution Control Commission asked utility companies to switch fuel for their furnaces from polluting oil and coal to clean-burning natural gas and ordered the city’s eleven belching garbage incinerators turned off. In Manhattan, all sufferers from respiratory ailments, heart diseases or bad colds, as well as children under two years old and the elderly, were advised to avoid the poisonous outside air.

By its third day, pollution levels in New York hovered dangerously above normal. Philadelphia had measurements of ten—the highest its scales record: Boston reported cottony clouds of smog; Baltimore was dimmed.

Belated Sweep. Temperatures climbed —Manhattan experienced a record 64° —as the bowl of stagnant air roofed the region. A scattering of New York hospitals reported an increase in lung-ailment complaints. Finally, with weather forecasts indicating no relief, officials called a first-stage smog alert* in New York, New Jersey and Connecticut.

The alert was too late to reduce most factory fumes and did little to deter motorists from flocking to the city for the traditional post-Thanksgiving buying splurge. The break finally came, not because of the alert measures, but from evening showers that washed the dirty air. By week’s end the inversion layer was breaking up as the westerly wind returned to sweep clean the skies.

Revenge. The scare, in its way, was nature’s revenge for man’s abuse of his environment. Few areas of the U.S. are free from air pollution. Damage to American property is estimated at $11 billion in the 7,300 American communities plagued by smog. Though New York and a handful of other communities have started anti-pollution programs in recent years, few begin to compare with the tough program of Los Angeles, which—despite its reputation as smog capital of the U.S.—has kept its air breathable by prohibiting all coal fires, allowing oil burning only five months of the year and early recognition of the need for auto exhaust control devices (which, under federal law, will be mandatory for all ’68 models).

More stringent precautions may be needed nationwide. By 1980, says Frank M. Stead, chief of California’s Environmental Sanitation Division, air pollution will be so heavy that no amount of existing controls will suffice to regulate it. The only solution, wrote Stead in a paper released last week, is the elimination of all gasoline-burning cars and trucks in California within the next 14 years. As a possible replacement, Stead proposed electric vehicles.

* In which large fuel consumers, incinerator operators, vehicle drivers, and home and apartment-house owners are asked voluntarily to reduce or stop burning fuels and wastes. In Stage 2, reduction becomes mandatory; in 3, ”a serious danger to public health” is declared and stringent limitation placed on all traffic and commercial activity.