Quote:
Originally Posted by CaliNative
^^^
"I had no idea smog was this bad, this early (1940)"
I remember days in the late 1950s and into the 1960s where the visibility was so bad because of the smog that the Verdugo Mountains and Santa Monica Mountains were invisible from where I lived near Oxnard & Cahuenga in NoHo. The hills were just a few miles away. Sometimes the smog made things less than half a mile away look fuzzy. It was bad especially in late summer and early autumn when the inversions were the worst. Winter was the only season when smog was rare. My parents told me that they recalled smog (not as bad) as far back as the 1920s, when the air had inversions. The air got a bit clearer in the 1930s, when the depression cut auto traffic and economic activity. WW2 brought the first of the bad smog, when the factories cranked up. The pre WW2 smog was called "smoke" or "haze", as the term "smog" (SMOke+foG) hadn't been invented until the 1940s. Smog was also bad in many of the eastern cities, e.g. Pittsburgh, with all the steel plants. An episode in Donora, PA in 1952 killed a lot of people. London of course has bad "pea soup" smog/fog episodes going way back. One episode in the early 1950s killed hundreds. Fortunately the smog problem is orders of magnitude less severe than it was before the 1980s. Severe smog alerts declined sharply after catalytic converters were put in cars in the '70s, and big industrial polluters were controlled. The progress was at first gradual, since it took years to retire the old polluting cars. The first measure taken was in the 1950s, when backyard trash incinerators were prohibited.
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Hey
caliNative...excellent summation of the horrible smog days.
May I add that in the 1950's the smog was so bad that just a few minutes outside and my eyes would sting and begin to water. Any gym class outside would cause my lungs to fill with the foul air. Breathing would be painful and I had to literally stop exercising. Take a deep breath and experience pain in my chest. There was a lot of suffering in those days.
One study they harped on the 1950s was all of the hamburger stands and fast food joints also contributed to the smog. Cities rushed to require filters on all smokestacks poking out of food preparation kitchens in LA County.
KCET