Ĭalifornia’s then-governor hired a guy to make recommendations about pollution reforms. And nine years later, California got scared straight by the deaths of thousands of Londoners in a historic 1952 smog incident. vowed, futilely, to get rid of the smog within four months. It wasn’t until the early 1950s that it became clear that the exhaust from the cars everyone was using to get around was causing most of the smog. Shutting down a plant that was blamed for the unprecedented smog didn’t help, writes McNally, and the problem just got worse. The Los Angeles Times once called it “daylight dim out.” But the term “smog” eventually entered the popular vernacular – mixing the words smoke and fog. Summertime worsened all this, even though it took a little while longer for our scientific knowledge of smog to catch up with our allergies to it.
Los angeles area air raid alert 1960s plus#
The problem until the 1940s, she wrote, was that nobody knew exactly what smog was (nitrogen oxide and volatile organic compounds – both found in fuels – mix with sunlight to form ground-level ozone, plus tiny particles of matter from fossil fuels) or how it was caused. Industrial smoke had elicited complaints in Los Angeles since at least 1903, wrote Cone, but what one government report referred to as a “hellish cloud” was something much more significant. It felt like the air got bad all at once. But in the summer of 1943, everybody’s eyes watered. City Council first took action trying to limit industrial pollution in 1905. Smog filled air in LA The causesĪir pollution from industrial sources had been building for decades: the L.A. Kelly described this dark day in Angeleno history in the first line of their essential book, Smogtown : “The beast you couldn’t stab fanned its poison across the waking downtown.” The “beast” was smog. But the influx of cars and industry, combined with a geography that traps fumes like a big bowl, had caught up with Angelenos.” the largest car market the industry had ever seen. “Massive wartime immigration to a city built for cars had made L.A. “As residents would later find out, the fog was not from an outside attacker, but from their own vehicles and factories,” writes Jess McNally for Wired. But as they’d discover, they were just having the first experience of a new phenomenon that would become one of L.A.’s defining characteristics. In the midst of World War II, people thought the city was under attack. Photos of Los Angeles taken on this day in 1943 show a city shrouded in thick, biting smog. Visibility was cut down to three city blocks. 77 years later, this event is still remembered by many, and should be a warning for all of us.
After talking about improvements of air quality in some cities, today we want to remember possibly one of the worst days for breathing in the world’s entire history, when on Ja “gas attack” hit the city of Los Angeles.