By KAREN PARKER
County Line Publisher Emeritus
One of my New Year’s resolutions is to turn off cable television as part of treating my PTSD (Persistent Trump Stress Syndrome). One solution has been to binge watch “The Crown,” Netflix’s series on Queen Elizabeth.
Usually I am not that interested in the history I have lived through. No, I am not so old that the queen is my peer, but I have been around for most of her reign. I suffered through the first few episodes, and then became firmly addicted. And I haven’t even gotten into the second season.
One episode that ignited my curiosity depicted the Great London Smog of 1952. Myhusband, a far greater Churchill scholar than I, had not heard of it, which led me to some digging.
The event happened in December 1952, when a bizarre pollution event befell London. Cold weather and windless conditions combined with airborne pollutants primarily from coal burningin homes and factories throughout the city.
The city was trapped in a deadly cloud of smog for five days. Not only did the cloudobscure vision, but also it was so loaded with sulfur dioxide, carbon dioxide, and smoke particles that the elderly, the young and those with compromised immune systems began to die by the hundreds.
The smog was so thick that traffic was brought to a halt. Concealed by the thick blanket, criminals were able to boldly rob shops and mug pedestrians without fear of being caught. One killer dominated the headlines: a man who had murdered at least six women, stashing their corpses under the floorboards and into the cupboards of his apartment in Notting Hill. The fog was so thick that pedestrians could not see their feet and often fell over curbstones or walked in front of moving vehicles,
Oddly enough, British climatologists saw the disaster coming. They even had a name for it: the Donora effect. A similar weather event had occurred in Donora, Penn., in 1948, when 20 people died. Oddly enough, this small rural town recognized the coming disaster, but London did not; Donorans set up a triage center and alerted its population to the dangers at hand.
Londoners, on the other hand, dismissed the smog as just “another pea soup event” and made no attempt to rescue its citizens from the event.
Prime Minister Winston Churchill assured Londoners the fog would lift as it always did. Worse yet, he had encouraged the use of coal burning after World War II. Some members of parliament were so enraged that they considered a no-confidence vote to remove him from office.
Londoners paid a deadly price for this lack of foresight. At the time, 4,000 deaths were attributed to the deadly smog. But later studies of the incident put the number closer to 12,000. Included was the major uptick in deaths from respiratory illness after the smog had long blown away. For decades afterward, Londoners suffered higher rates of asthma than did their countrymen in other parts of Great Britain.
All of this happened almost 75 years ago, so what are we doing in the good old USA? We want to revive the coal industry. Yippee. For a few votes from coal country, we will happily risk the health and welfare of citizens millions of citizens. When will we face the fact that coal mining’s time has come and gone? Who doesn’t sympathize with coalminers who have lost the only good-paying jobs they are likely to ever have? We are not going to save those jobs for the long term any more than we will bring back the ice man, the harness maker, the computer keypunch operator or any job (including newspapering) that has been forced to cope with changes brought about by the Internet.
Despite the Trump administrations’ rearguard action to save coal, coal plants are closing by the dozens, replaced by cheaper natural gas, and Texas is about to produce more energy from wind than from coal. Even three Trump appointments have turned their backs on coal.
The Washington Post reports this week, “The decision by the Republican-controlled Federal Energy Regulatory Commission was unexpected and comes amid repeated promises by Trump to revive coal as the nation’s top power source. The industry has been besieged by multiple bankruptcies and a steady loss of market share as natural gas and renewable energy flourish.
“The energy commission said in its decision that despite claims by the administration to the contrary, there’s no evidence that any past or planned retirements of coal-fired power plants pose a threat to reliability of the nation’s electric grid.”
We have long known the dangers of coal: the occupational dangers to the miners, the pollution in the atmosphere, and ground and water pollution from strip mining, to name just a few.
It should not be a partisan issue. We should all rejoice at the end of the coal era, regardless of how much the old duffer in the White House thinks we ought to go back to 1952.
