What world’s deadliest smogs teach us
NEW DELHI: The day after Diwali, Delhi woke up to find itself enveloped in a cloud of smog so thick that you could not see beyond a few feet. There was a sharp decline in air quality, with most places registering off-the-charts severe conditions. Reports suggest that Delhi’s air quality over Diwali weekend was one of the worst in the world.
But when it comes to battling deadly smogs, the Delhi of 2016 has many historical counterparts. After the Industrial Revolution, many cities in the world have been choked by poisonous clouds of smog, resulting in new laws and regulations regarding pollution.
On December 3, 1930, most of Belgium was shrouded in a cold foggy mist, but what the denselypopulated valley of Meuse, east of Leige, witnessed has become a landmark in any study of air pollution.
The heavily industrialized area was home to steelworks, zinc smelters, glass manufacturers and fertilizer and explosives plants. The cocktail of pollutants from these industries, including what later researchers say were gaseous fluorine and sulphur compounds, were prevented from rising by a temperature inversion. The city stewed in the toxic fumes for three whole days before the smog lifted.
60 deaths are attributed to the fog. Many people reported nausea, vomiting, laryngeal irritation, dysponoeic breathing – asthma-like attacks with labored expiration.
What Delhi can learn: On December 6, the Royal Prosecutor of Leige opened a judicial enquiry and appointed a committee of medical experts to ascertain the causes. The Belgian Government voted 250,000 fr to defray the cost of the investigation. This was the first documented incident that showed air pollution could prove to be fatal. In 1948, the southern Pennsylvania town of Donora woke up to a yellow haze. This wasn’t new for a town where a steel and zinc plant chuffed out great puffs of smoke every day. But the town had never seen what unfolded over the course of the next five days: a yellowish-black smog darkened the skies and refused to lift.
The smog left 20 dead and 6,000 affected. It sickened half the town, creating a burning sensation in throat and eyes. At one time, the Donora Hotel was converted into an emergency hospital as hospitals ran out of beds.
What Delhi can learn: In 1949, the state government established the Division of Air Pollution Control to study the event. A milliondollar suit was filed against the operator of the Donora Zinc Works’ American Steel and Wire Company and the plant shut down nine years after the event. The environmental disaster led to the formation of federal laws and agencies to control pollution, including Pennsylvania’s 1970 ‘Environmental Bill of Rights’, which states that “the people have a right to clean air, [and] pure water….”, the national Environmental Protection Agency, and the Clean Air Act passed by the Congress. In the December of 1952, London grappled with a poisonous haze that consumed the city for five days and is remembered as the world’s deadliest smog. The smog was a mixture of several deadly elements: sulphurous fumes from coal fires that Londoners lit to get through a particularly cold night, gases from factories, the misty fog and an anticyclone which prevented the toxic air from dispersing.
4,000 lost their lives and many suffered breathing problems. Prize cattle displayed at Smithfield died of suffocation, leading people to fashion masks for their livestock. In the Isle of Dogs, people could not see their feet as they walked.
What Delhi can learn: When the haze lifted from London, the city launched an investigation into what had happened. The Clean Air Acts of 1956 and 1968 were a direct outcome of the killer smog, which banned emissions of black smoke and made it mandatory for urban residents and factory owners to convert to smokeless fuels.
What happened? Many of China’s cities have a poor air quality record, but in January 2013, AQI in Beijing went up to 993, signaling an ‘airpocalyspe’ in the country. Visibility was so poor that entire buildings disappeared in the haze.
People stopped venturing outside unless necessary, and even then, with face masks on. The Children’s Hospital in Beijing reported treating 7,000 patients on a daily basis. The smog affected other Chinese cities as well, impacting 800 million people, according to researchers. Cases of lung cancer were detected in very young patients, which were linked to the pollution.
What Delhi can learn: The government responded by cracking down on firecrackers and outdoor barbecues during the Chinese New Year celebrations. Cracker sales declined by 37%. Beijing also pledged to lower its PM2.5 levels, earmarking $277 billion plan to cut down pollution and emissions. Read the full story on world’s deadliest smogs at