MISSOURI: Fresh Air

For 75 years St. Louis has had a smoke problem. It has had a smoke commissioner ever since Lee surrendered. And it still has smoke—on windless winter days aviators flying toward the city see, rising over the skyscrapers and chimneys, a vast bulging black parachute of mixed fog and soot that blots out the world below. Suburbanites driving to work on sunny mornings switch on their car lights as they approach the business district and drive into what looks like a gigantic rusty iron wall rising from the pavement to the sky—the smoke that lies thick and russet-green under the early sun. Because most St. Louis furnaces use Southern Illinois soft coal that burns cheaply, gaseously, smokily, because St. Louis has 160,000 chimneys, because fog rising from Mississippi River lowlands combines with smoke to create harsh, gritty, lung-injuring, bitter-tasting “smog,” St. Louis’ smoke problem is the worst in the U. S., costs the city and its home owners some $19,000,000 yearly for new wallpaper, laundering, artificial lighting, repainting, etc.

This winter’s smoke has been the worst so far. Prodded by the city newspapers (and by ambitions for a third term in 1941) St. Louis’ stubborn Mayor Bernard F. Dickmann last December agreed that slow moves for smoke abatement had to be turned into fast moves for smoke elimination, set up a seven-man board to consider new measures.

Last week the committee turned in its report, recommended that: 1) users of Southern Illinois coal must install mechanical fuel burning equipment to burn it smokelessly; 2) all others must use smokeless fuel — coke, oil, briquettes, gas; 3) if necessary the city must buy, sell and distribute smokeless fuel to bring it to consumers cheaply. Those measures were designed to eliminate St. Louis smoke in three years. Mayor Dickmann endorsed the plan, pledged that he would push the recommendations, and deep breathers could look forward to the day when St. Louis air would again be fresh.