Pod Insights This Podcast Will Kill You Ep 185 The Great Smog of London: “Thick, drab, yellow, disgusting” About this episode Some things just go together: peanut butter and jelly, bacon and eggs, milk and cereal, London and smog. Or at least, that’s the way things used to be until the Great Smog of 1952. (Don’t worry, the first three pairings are safe). If you’ve watched The Crown, you may remember an early episode in which a thick, noxious smog surrounded the entire city of London for days on end. People coughing, hacking, collapsing. Traffic ground to a standstill. Authorities in denial. What was actually going on in December 1952 to lead to such conditions? What was in the smog to make it so toxic? And how did this severe pollution event lead to massive changes in air quality regulations around the world? Tune in to find out all this and more (including what The Crown got wrong).
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Transcript 13,188 words · 7 speakers
0:01 Speaker 00 This is Exactly Right.
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0:38 Speaker 02 Hey, I'm Niall Rogers. This fall, I'll be driving across the country, meeting some of today's coolest and most fascinating artists. We'll explore the stories before the moments that changed everything. Because every musician remembers the moment where it all began. Experience Before the Moment, a Lincoln Original Series on the iHeartRadio app, YouTube, or wherever you get your podcasts.
1:09 Speaker 03 Fifty years ago, at the time of the Great Smog of December 1952, I was resident medical officer at what was, in those days, one of London's teaching hospitals, the Middlesex Hospital. As we now know, but did not at the time, the borough of Westminster in which we were situated was the part of London where the fog was most dense. As for my personal recollection of the smog itself, at its worst, it had the effect of completely disorientating me in a part of London I knew well, so that I lost my way on a minor errand from the Middlesex Hospital to Oxford Street, 400 yards away. To get my bearings and to discover where I was, I had to creep on the pavement
1:53 Speaker 03 along the walls of the buildings to the next corner to read the name of the street. I do not recall any smell, but I do remember an eerie silence as there was little or no traffic. Visibility was less than three meters, and it was bitterly cold. Somehow, although I find this difficult to understand, sufficient ambulances got to us to deliver patients to take up every available bed. The fog itself swirled into the wards and seemed to consist principally of smuts, so that the wash basins and baths turned darker and darker gray, until it was possible, literally, to write one's name on them, which I actually did.
2:35 Speaker 03 Within a day or two, I had to telephone the senior surgeon to ask leave to cancel all admissions from the waiting lists until further notice. As I remember the patients themselves, the clinical picture I have in my mind's eye is of middle-aged and elderly people, principally men, gasping for breath, with remarkably little in the way of rails or ronkai to hear in their chests. Within a few days, patients with acute respiratory distress spilled over into all wards, regardless of the specialty or gender. They were in the surgical wards and even in the obstetric wards, and as the majority were men, room had to be found in some of the women's wards. I remember also that the supply of oxygen was stretched to the limit. There were also many deaths.
3:20 Speaker 03 Indeed, I remember the morticians ran out of space in the mortuary and in the chapel of rest, and we had to use the anatomy department's dissecting room in another building. Bearing in mind the extreme loss of visibility in the streets, I would expect that many people died at home without medical help.
4:26 Speaker 01 Oof, Erin.
4:28 Speaker 03 I mean, that is like from the front lines.
4:32 Speaker 01 Right. I mean, that's someone who was there, who witnessed all of it, who lived through it and was a physician at the time, so saw so many people.
4:41 Speaker 03 So many more people than the rest.
4:43 Speaker 01 Yes, yeah.
4:45 Speaker 03 It is, I think it really brings home, you know, like, I'll talk more about The Crown later on in this episode, but I think it kind of brings home like what it actually was like to be there and experience this rather than just like reading about it and you're like, okay, but like, what does it actually mean? How did people actually get sick?
5:04 Speaker 01 Right.
5:04 Speaker 03 Yeah. So that was a firsthand account from a Dr. Donald Asheson, and I found it in this like 50 years later type of a recollection of different stories, a symposium about the Great Smog of London in 1952, which is our topic for today.
5:21 Speaker 01 It sure is.
5:22 Speaker 03 Hi, I'm Erin Welsh.
5:24 Speaker 01 And I'm Erin Allman Updike.
5:25 Speaker 03 And this is This Podcast Will Kill You.
5:28 Speaker 01 We're talking about the Great Smog of 1952.
5:30 Speaker 03 The Great, Great Smog, except it wasn't great. It was like pretty bad.
5:35 Speaker 01 It was horrific. I mean, great in the literal sense, right?
5:39 Speaker 03 Sure.
5:39 Speaker 01 Meaning like.
5:40 Speaker 03 In one of the literal senses, yeah.
5:41 Speaker 01 Yes, yes, yes, yes. There you go.
5:45 Speaker 03 This is, I'm really excited to do this episode because like, yes, it is, it is a very specific topic.
5:51 Speaker 01 It really is.
5:52 Speaker 03 Here's the singular event, but at the same time, it's really not.
5:57 Speaker 01 Oh, it has some pretty wide-reaching implications, Erin?
5:59 Speaker 03 It might, it might. It might have a deep historical context, it might.
6:04 Speaker 01 I'm excited because you carry this episode and I'm mostly just along for the ride.
6:10 Speaker 03 I mean, I think it helps that I found a really good book and this is like a, it's, it's a narrative, but
6:17 Speaker 01 I love it.
6:18 Speaker 03 There's, there's a lot to unpack here. And before we do that, it's
6:22 Speaker 01 It's quarantine time.
6:23 Speaker 03 quarantine time. I mean, we, we would have to drink nothing other than the London smog.
6:28 Speaker 01 The London smog.
6:29 Speaker 03 Yeah. Based on a London fog. I mean, you can just do a London fog if you would like, but if you want to make it dirty, hence the smog part, you can add whatever liquor, liqueur you want. And in case you don't know, London fog is Earl Grey tea, steamed milk, some lavender, vanilla. It's really good.
6:48 Speaker 01 It's fantastic. It's one of my husband's favorite bevs.
6:51 Speaker 03 It's such a like
6:52 Speaker 01 little treat.
6:53 Speaker 03 Yeah.
6:56 Speaker 03 We'll post the full recipe for the London smog on our website, thispodcastwillkillyou.com, as well as on all of our social media channels. If you're not following us, you should be. We're on Instagram, we're on Blue Sky, we're on Facebook, we're on TikTok. I think that covers it. And we also have a website, thispodcastwillkillyou.com. It's got all kinds of things like transcripts. It's got
7:17 Speaker 01 I love not having to do this.
7:19 Speaker 03 I saw your face like bracing for it.
7:22 Speaker 01 I know. I was preparing myself.
7:25 Speaker 03 It's got links to our bookshop.org affiliate account, our Goodreads list, links to Blood Mobile, who provides the music for all of our episodes and is also on Instagram these days. Contact us, form a submit your first hand account form. It's, you know, there's a treasure trove. So just check it out.
7:43 Speaker 01 Yeah, it's there. Thispodcastwillkillyou.com. If you haven't already rated, reviewed, and subscribed on your favorite podcatcher, if you're listening on iHeart Podcasts or Apple Podcasts or Spotify, click the, the buttons to do the thing. And we're on YouTube as a reminder.
7:58 Speaker 03 As a reminder.
7:58 Speaker 01 Follow the Exactly Right Network channel. Before Erin, I ask you to tell me all about the great smog. I actually have two corrections that I'd like to make.
8:07 Speaker 03 It's been a long time since we've done a corrections corner.
8:10 Speaker 01 It has.
8:11 Speaker 03 Probably too long.
8:13 Speaker 01 It's not like we've been right the whole time. No, no, we're just ignoring our minor mistakes, but not today. I was listening through our last episode, which is gallbladder. And so people will probably have pointed this out, but at this point, I'm preempting myself with two clarifications slash corrections I want to make.
8:32 Speaker 03 Okay.
8:32 Speaker 01 Number one. You were asking a lot, Erin, about like the color of bile. Yeah, I got really deep into the color for some reason. Which I, I love, but now I want to correct myself because it, you were like, oh, I've always thought it was yellow. And, and then I made you feel like you were wrong. But you're not wrong. It is a yellow green. Okay. It's just on the greener spectrum of yellow than like an orange juice Harvey Wallbanger situation. Right. Like our quarantine was. Yeah. So, but however, you also asked about if you are barfing yellow, could it be bile? And I said, it could be, or it could not be, which is correct. But what I want to clarify
9:15 Speaker 01 is that it doesn't always mean that there's something really serious or dangerous going on if somebody is vomiting up bile. We get really worried about something like an obstructive process or something like that if the bile is on that greenish side because that means that there's a large volume of bile, which is worrisome. However, if you have been barfing and dry heaving and you have a completely empty stomach, you might have a little bit of bile that refluxes into your stomach, mixes with the stomach acid, and then you might have a vomit that's more yellow on that like true yellow spectrum of color that might have some bile in it. So I just wanted to clarify so no one's like panicking if they're barfing yellow. We're not a medical advice podcast, but you know what I mean?
10:00 Speaker 01 Yeah. Okay. Okay. And then I think dogs also barf bile that's pretty yellow pretty frequently. I have cleaned up a lot of that in my life. Yeah.
10:11 Speaker 01 And then the second thing is kind of a fun clarification. You asked about liver transplants and whether the gallbladder is like there or not. And I didn't know. So I looked it up. When you do a liver transplant, not only is the donor gallbladder removed during that process, so it doesn't get donated, but the person who's having their liver transplanted also has their gallbladder removed during that process.
10:36 Speaker 03 Is it just because the gallbladder is like, kind of finicky and prone to things going wrong?
10:42 Speaker 01 Yeah, maybe. Maybe it's just like, because there's a higher risk of complications, but also because we don't need it. And so why not eliminate that?
10:49 Speaker 03 One less thing to attach, reattach after all of the
10:51 Speaker 01 Attach and reattach, or like, unattach, because then if you, if you unattach it from the liver and all of its connective tissue there, then it's just going to be hanging. And then, yeah, to reconnect an organ that we technically don't need. So anyways, you lose a gallbladder if you get a liver transplant.
11:06 Speaker 03 How about it?
11:07 Speaker 01 How about it? So interesting. We should do more transplant episodes, though.
11:12 Speaker 03 We really should. There's, there's so much that we could do. Uh, yeah, yeah.
11:17 Speaker 01 But anyways, that's the end of my corrections. Erin, will you tell us all about the Great Smog of 1952?
11:25 Speaker 03 Uh, I cannot wait. Um, except we have to because we have to take a quick break and then we'll get right into it.
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12:06 Speaker 02 Hey, I'm Niall Rogers, producer, songwriter, guitarist, and co-founder of the group Chic. A great song has a way of defining a moment, a moment of joy, heartbreak, or anything in between. This fall, I'll be driving across the country, dropping in on some of the coolest, most fascinating artists working today. We'll go deep into their lives and careers and hear what it was like before the moment that made them. From hitmakers like Miguel.
12:40 Speaker 00 That last year, finishing that record was the hardest experience of my life. Regardless of how everyone else buys into this. I believe in this and I'm gonna push.
12:51 Speaker 02 To rising stars like Alex Warren.
12:54 Speaker 04 You know, a song is a story and the verse is setting the scene. And for me, at least, it's allowing me to be personal and vulnerable with the audience. Whether it's about my wife and I'm being vulnerable about her, or it's about, you know, my parents and I'm being vulnerable to them. And it's almost like a cinematic piece in a way where each song tells that beautiful story.
13:13 Speaker 02 It's gonna be one hell of a trip. Experience Before the Moment, a Lincoln Original Series on the iHeartRadio app, YouTube, or wherever you get your podcasts.
13:37 Speaker 03 The first to notice the deaths were the undertakers, which is probably what you might expect. Maybe, but depressing. It is depressing. But it also wasn't just the undertakers. It was also the florists. Yeah. More calls were coming in than they could handle. There were funerals being scheduled out for weeks and weeks. And the florists couldn't keep up with the demand for funeral wreaths. Deaths were clearly on the rise in London. But why? In the months that followed the great smog of December 1952, public health officials and politicians sifted through the records, trying to piece together what exactly had
14:20 Speaker 03 happened to kill so many people in such a short timeframe. But the true cost of this tragedy, it wouldn't be comprehended for another 50 years after the last day of that choking smoke. Wow. Yeah. Yeah, I'll, I'll get more into it in a second.
14:39 Speaker 03 But, you know. Fog in London had gone hand in hand for centuries. Like, it was part of the fabric of the city. In Charles Dickens's Bleak House, which was published in 1853, he wrote, quote, "Fog everywhere, fog up the river where it flows among green eights and meadows, fog down the river where it rolls defiled among the tears of shipping and the waterside pollutions of a great and dirty city."
15:09 Speaker 01 Quite descriptive.
15:10 Speaker 03 I love it. AIT, by the way, this is a new word for me. This is your daily dose of vocabulary. A-I-T. It means small island on a river.
15:19 Speaker 01 Oh, okay.
15:20 Speaker 03 How specific.
15:21 Speaker 01 So specific.
15:22 Speaker 03 Yeah. Fog would feature in Dickens's other books as well. And in Robert Louis Stevenson's Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, the London fog provided a cover under which Hyde committed his crimes.
15:34 Speaker 01 Oh, yes. I feel like there's a lot of that, like, you know, dark and foggy London.
15:41 Speaker 03 Yeah. Creeping around the corners. Yeah. Which also, incidentally, would be a big theme of the 1952 London fog and like, all the crime that was committed under the cover of fog.
15:54 Speaker 01 Yeah. The guise of fog. I don't know if guise is the right word, but you know what I mean.
15:59 Speaker 03 Someone let us know and we'll do a Corrections Corner next week.
16:04 Speaker 03 Actually, we won't because we'll be recording next week anyway. We don't need to get into the details of our logistics here.
16:12 Speaker 03 When the artist Claude Monet visited London at the turn of the 20th century, he was entranced by the fog. Quote, "Without the fog, London would not be a beautiful city. It is the fog that gives it its magnificent breadth. Those massive, regular blocks become grandiose within that mysterious cloak."
16:34 Speaker 01 Wow.
16:35 Speaker 03 I know.
16:36 Speaker 01 I wouldn't like London if not for the fog.
16:39 Speaker 03 Yeah.
16:39 Speaker 01 That's what he's basically saying.
16:42 Speaker 03 Thank gosh, I can't see anything.
16:44 Speaker 01 Yeah.
16:45 Speaker 03 I can't breathe well. Anyway, Oscar Wilde, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, T. S. Eliot, Thomas Hardy, Rudyard Kipling. It seemed impossible to write about London without writing about the fog that encircled it.
16:58 Speaker 01 Mm-hmm.
16:59 Speaker 03 Nathaniel Hawthorne wrote in 1857, sorry, I have like so many fog quotes, but...
17:03 Speaker 01 I love it.
17:04 Speaker 03 Okay, good. I do too. I could have done so many more, but I'm sparing you. Okay. This Nathaniel Hawthorne's quote, "The fog was denser than ever, very black indeed, more like a distillation of mud than anything else. So heavy was the gloom that gas was lighted in all the shop windows and the little charcoal furnaces of the women and boys, roasting chestnuts, threw a ruddy, misty glow around them. And yet, I liked it. This fog seems an atmosphere proper to huge, grimy London." End quote.
17:41 Speaker 01 And yet, I liked it. And yet, I liked it.
17:44 Speaker 03 His description is, it's, but you know, largely positive. He liked it. But it does cast a slightly different light on London's fog than Monet's did. A distillation of mud.
17:56 Speaker 01 Of mud.
17:56 Speaker 03 That sounds disgusting.
17:58 Speaker 01 Like, it would be hard to wade through.
18:01 Speaker 03 Yeah.
18:03 Speaker 03 Yeah, I don't, I don't think I have ever encountered a distillation of mud in the atmosphere, personally.
18:09 Speaker 01 Well, actually, no, I have.
18:11 Speaker 03 You have? Where?
18:12 Speaker 01 Oh, when I was in China, when I was working in China in 2014, there was a day that we woke up and I got texted, "Hey, yeah, we're not going to be able to go sampling today." And I looked out the window and it was yellow, the sky.
18:27 Speaker 03 That's exactly what the London smog was like, yeah.
18:29 Speaker 01 Yeah. It was, it was, and you couldn't see, like, you couldn't see the buildings across the way. And I was like, "Uh, what's going on, everyone?" And they were like, "Oh, they said it's just like the farmers burning the trash in their fields" or something. And I was like, "I don't think that's what this is." But anyways, we couldn't go outside for like a day or two.
18:47 Speaker 03 Yeah.
18:48 Speaker 01 Yeah.
18:49 Speaker 03 Intense. Okay, distillation of mud, there you go.
18:51 Speaker 01 Distillation of mud. It was, it was a thick, yellow, the whole air, yeah.
18:55 Speaker 03 Yeah. Okay, that, I mean, that about, yeah, that sounds like a, like a London fog, like a real pea-super, as, as they were called.
19:03 Speaker 01 Yes.
19:05 Speaker 03 That and that muddy fog in London came from the tons of coal burning in the city's factories and houses as it had since the 13th century, which is way, way further back than I realized. It's so much longer than I realized. I think I only think of it as an 1800s thing. Right. Industrial Revolution did put a different spin on things, but prior to the 13th century, the city was mostly heated by burning wood from the surrounding forests. But as London's population grew faster than the forests could keep up with, then the switch to coal was inevitable. And then just things got a lot worse in the in the Industrial Revolution. But coal smoke, yeah, it had filled the winter skies since
19:47 Speaker 03 that time, causing illness and sowing the seeds of conflict. There was a religious leader that was executed for the smog at one point in the 1600s. What? Yeah. I think that what had happened was that he, there was like a church that was damaged because of the coal smoke. And so he was like, someone needs to clean this up. We have to stop the coal smoke. And I think people were upset and they killed him. They killed him for it? Oh, my gosh. Yeah. Hardcore. Probably the truth is a little bit more nuanced than that, but that's what I recollect from when I read this stuff a week ago.
20:26 Speaker 03 But these historical fogs really did pale in comparison to those that were enhanced, I think, for lack of a better word, by the Industrial Revolution, beginning in the late 1700s. So when urban populations swelled and then factories continued to churn out more and more coal smoke, that smoke became increasingly toxic. In 1873, an estimated 300 people died from bronchitis over the course of a few days. And six years later, the fog all but blotted out the sun in the city for four months. Oh, my God. Which like, I don't know if it was like, it's not like nighttime, it's not like the asteroid dinosaurs type situation.
21:09 Speaker 01 But still, like, I remember Illinois for several months in the winter not having any sun from just clouds and it was miserable.
21:15 Speaker 03 I mean, truly horrible.
21:18 Speaker 01 Yeah.
21:18 Speaker 03 That's when I realized that like, it's not the temperature that matters, it's the
21:22 Speaker 01 It's the lack of sun.
21:24 Speaker 03 Yeah.
21:24 Speaker 01 Yeah.
21:25 Speaker 03 Yeah.
21:25 Speaker 01 Wow. And that was from smog, like smog fog?
21:28 Speaker 03 That was from smog, yeah. And, and Christmas Day apparently actually did more like, look more like nighttime than it looked like daytime.
21:35 Speaker 01 Oh, gosh.
21:36 Speaker 03 So, yeah. And shortly after this 1873 fog event, the Honorable R. Russell wrote, quote, "In winter, more than a million chimneys breathe forth simultaneously smoke, soot, sulfurous acid, vapor of water, and carbonic acid gas. And the whole town fumes like a vast crater, at the bottom of which its unhappy citizens must creep and live as best they can."
22:03 Speaker 01 Oy, oy.
22:05 Speaker 03 Yeah, end quote. The same year he wrote this, the National Smoke Abatement Society formed, which also was, uh, played a role in the 1952 thing. So it was, you know, longstanding.
22:18 Speaker 01 Yeah.
22:20 Speaker 03 "But we can't place the entire blame for London fog on industry or coal. The British Isles happen to be located in the path of the Gulf Stream, which brings warm waters to the area, keeping winters milder and summers cooler than mainland Europe. Its shifting winds, however, can do tricky things, like stagnating the smoky air over certain regions, preventing it from burning or blowing off. But even so, this was not the delicate, white, misty fog that you'd expect to see in the countryside." It, it was more like the smog that you saw, Erin. The Honorable R. Russell described it this way, quote,
22:59 Speaker 03 "A London fog is brown, reddish-yellow, or greenish, darkens more than a white fog, has a smoky or sulfurous smell, is often somewhat drier than a country fog, and produces, when thick, a choking sensation. Instead of diminishing while the sun rises higher, it often increases in density, and some of the most lowering London fogs occur about midday or late in the afternoon." A white cloth spread out on the ground rapidly turns dirty and particles of soot attach themselves to every exposed object, end quote.
23:35 Speaker 01 Oy, you can really
23:37 Speaker 03 It's visceral.
23:38 Speaker 01 Feel it. Yeah.
23:39 Speaker 03 Yeah.
23:39 Speaker 01 Yeah. Also, just realized that it was 2012 and not 2014 that I was there.
23:44 Speaker 03 Oh, yeah, in 2014, you were in Illinois.
23:46 Speaker 01 I know. I don't know why I said 2014. Probably just my brain was like, ah.
23:50 Speaker 03 I mean, once it's 10, once it's 10 years ago, it's, it becomes meaningless. You automatically get a plus or minus four years.
23:56 Speaker 01 Oh, thank you. Okay, then. No worries.
24:01 Speaker 03 This polluted London air was so distinctive that in 1905, a whole new word was invented to describe it.
24:10 Speaker 01 Smog.
24:13 Speaker 03 Isn't that amazing? I never thought about, I mean, I knew that like smog was
24:18 Speaker 01 Smoke and fog.
24:19 Speaker 03 Yeah. What do you call that, that term?
24:21 Speaker 01 Oh.
24:22 Speaker 03 Portman.
24:23 Speaker 01 Portmanteau?
24:24 Speaker 03 Yes.
24:24 Speaker 01 Is that right?
24:25 Speaker 03 I think, someone let us know, because our phones are being used to video this.
24:29 Speaker 01 Yeah, we can't.
24:30 Speaker 03 Google it.
24:31 Speaker 01 Look it up. Two words equals one new word.
24:34 Speaker 03 I think so.
24:36 Speaker 03 Like frenemy.
24:37 Speaker 01 Frenemy. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Family.
24:41 Speaker 03 Yeah.
24:45 Speaker 03 And those are all the ones we can think of. Smog.
24:49 Speaker 01 Smog.
24:49 Speaker 03 Smog. There we go.
24:53 Speaker 03 Otherwise, you know, sometimes on especially smoggy day, P. Supa, like I said, and restrictions on coal smoke, they existed, but they were largely ignored, even though the health effects were known in like a more general sense. It was just sort of seen as the price of progress. And there were occasional upsides to this smog, like during the Blitz and World War II, when smog masked the city from enemy bombers. But overall, it was a deeply detested, unhappily tolerated London institution.
25:22 Speaker 01 Okay.
25:23 Speaker 03 All right. So now I want you to pretend, I mean, we're doing this on video, but like, I don't have the skills to make this graphic.
25:30 Speaker 01 Uh huh.
25:30 Speaker 03 So I want you to pretend that there's a graphic of calendar pages turning, you know, like, and then you see December 1952 emerging on the final page. Yeah.
25:41 Speaker 01 Okay.
25:42 Speaker 03 By the time the last month of 1952 dawned, the UK had already had quite an eventful year.
25:50 Speaker 01 Okay.
25:50 Speaker 03 In February, King George VI died, leaving Elizabeth to take over the Crown. A severe, yep, if you have seen The Crown, this is...
25:59 Speaker 01 That's when it starts.
26:00 Speaker 03 That's basically when it starts, yeah. Episode four of this first season is the smog episode. So if you are interested in watching it, that's the one to watch.
26:09 Speaker 01 I don't really remember this episode. I've watched the first couple of few seasons.
26:14 Speaker 03 Okay.
26:14 Speaker 01 And I don't remember this episode at all.
26:16 Speaker 03 I only watched, like, for this thing. I watched the first four episodes. And then for research, yeah, I was like, this is, what a burden that I have to watch TV for my job.
26:28 Speaker 01 Yeah, it's so hard.
26:29 Speaker 03 Yeah. But I do have some nitpicky things that I will say later about that episode.
26:35 Speaker 01 Okay.
26:36 Speaker 03 But also in 1952, there was a severe storm in August that caused substantial flooding in southwestern England, leading to the deaths of dozens. There was an airshow disaster a few weeks later that led to dozens of spectators killed. And then not long after that, the second most deadly railway crash in England's history occurred with over 100 people dying.
26:57 Speaker 01 I remember that episode, I think only because I looked it up afterwards to be like, is this real?
27:02 Speaker 03 I don't, so this is so funny, because I don't remember this episode and I just watched them. And so now, I mean, I think I was distracted during the first three.
27:11 Speaker 01 I was just also wondering if it was a manufactured memory, but I'm pretty sure it's like a whole episode was this, because it's the coal, it's like in a coal town, right? That this happens?
27:20 Speaker 03 Oh, Erin, I don't know.
27:22 Speaker 01 Okay, sorry. Anyways, maybe I'm getting confused.
27:24 Speaker 03 But there was fog that was suspected in the crash.
27:27 Speaker 01 Interesting.
27:28 Speaker 03 Yeah. And so that sort of foreshadowed really that year, the deadly potential of coal smoke.
27:34 Speaker 01 Okay.
27:35 Speaker 03 These disasters and historic events really punctuated what had been another difficult year for the 8 million people living in the city. Sort of like the cherries on top of a very long decade, just a rough...
27:50 Speaker 01 Like a crappy sundae?
27:51 Speaker 03 A crappy sundae.
27:52 Speaker 01 Okay.
27:53 Speaker 03 Just the worst ice cream.
27:54 Speaker 01 Yeah.
27:55 Speaker 03 Yeah.
27:56 Speaker 01 Coal flavored.
27:57 Speaker 03 I can't quite imagine what coal flavored ice cream would be like, but not good.
28:01 Speaker 01 Yeah.
28:02 Speaker 03 Yeah. London was still very much recovering from World War II, seven years after its end, with many buildings still in ruins or under construction from the air raids that had killed 70,000 civilians across Britain.
28:17 Speaker 03 If you were over the age of 35, you had already lived through two world wars, which is hard to comprehend. Yeah.
28:29 Speaker 03 Yeah. Rationing was still in effect for many items and economic hardship reached every home, as well as the government, which struggled with mountains of wartime debt. Perhaps the only industry that wasn't struggling in 1952 was the coal industry, which employed over 700,000 people. Wow. A whole lot of coal was needed to heat the homes throughout the country. And in London, every home was equipped with at least one coal-burning fireplace. For the vast majority of people, coal was really the only option that you had to stay warm. Like, electric heating wasn't really a thing quite yet, or it was like the transition hadn't happened. But this wasn't the sole reason, or even one of the major reasons,
29:14 Speaker 03 that the coal industry was booming. It was booming because they were selling off the higher-quality coal as an export to help drive down the national debt. Londoners could really only buy and afford the cheap, dirtier, burning coal nicknamed Nutty Slack. I don't know. I should have looked up where it got this nickname, but Nutty Slack, yeah. And you actually, if you wanted to heat your living space, you would have to burn a lot more Nutty Slack than you would have, like, higher-quality coal. And then it also burned a lot dirtier, so you're ending up producing a lot more toxic smoke and a lot more smoke overall. But with an election on the horizon, the party in power, which was the Conservative
29:57 Speaker 03 Party, or Tories, wanted to distract from discussions about the national debt, meaning no talking about cleaner fuel sources, no selling higher quality coal domestically. Nutty slack was good enough.
30:11 Speaker 01 It's great.
30:12 Speaker 03 It's great. And there was a lot of it. The largest stock of all grades of coal since the war ended, nineteen and a half million tons.
30:22 Speaker 01 Wow, okay.
30:24 Speaker 03 Okay. This mog begins. On December 4th, the fog rose long before most residents of the city, circling the buildings and blotting out the rising sun. Those who hoped the fog might burn away by noon would be disappointed, as the anticyclone that drifted over London continued to hover there. And the winds that usually accompanied a system like this just were nowhere to be found. It was shaping up to be a real pea-super of a day. And I never thought I'd get to say the word pea-super like
30:56 Speaker 01 So many times.
30:57 Speaker 03 Yeah. I love pea-soup, too, so feels
31:01 Speaker 01 I know that about you.
31:02 Speaker 03 Yeah. I've always been a pea-soup fan. Gosh. Anyway, city officials braced themselves on this day for the logistical troubles that it would cause, mostly thinking in terms of traffic. As the sun rose behind a thick blanket of fog on the next morning, December 5th, winds yet again were a no-show. And the only thing that was clear was that the fog was here to stay. And it was getting worse. Officials shut down all river and air traffic, buses were delayed, commuters waiting on train platforms couldn't see more than like 50 yards ahead of them, but even that would seem like crystal clear visibility as the days went on. Which is, yeah.
31:46 Speaker 01 Terrifying.
31:47 Speaker 03 The fog got its first mention in a newspaper that day, with the Manchester Guardian reporting that, quote, "The first real fog of the year has enveloped London today. An old-fashioned pea-super. Thick, drab, yellow, disgusting." End quote. Which is like, my favorite. Like, sums it all up in just four adjectives.
32:09 Speaker 01 That's the meteorological report for the day? Imagine that. You're watching TV and they're like, "It's disgusting."
32:16 Speaker 03 It's disgusting out there.
32:17 Speaker 01 Back to you, Todd.
32:23 Speaker 03 So this, that reporter and most other Londoners still treated the fog as just like another day in the London winter. Okay. But those monitoring air pollution were getting increasingly concerned, realizing that this was not, in fact, just another P-Super. Yeah. In less than 24 hours, the amounts of smoke and sulfur dioxide in the air had increased five times over. And those were just the things that they could actually monitor. There were other compounds like carbon dioxide, carbon monoxide, hazardous chemicals like vanadium spewing from diesel oil engines. These, they could only guess, were increasing. Yeah. If you ventured out into the fog, as many people had to do to continue with their, you know, their lives, their work, their school, their shopping, whatever they needed
33:08 Speaker 03 to do, they would return home with fog-stained clothing, tarnished buttons, just a grimy film on exposed skin and hair. Eech. And even if you covered your nose and mouth with like a cloth handkerchief or something, it would be stained and gunky almost immediately. Ugh. Every breath you took, you choked and burned. It triggered asthma attacks and coughing fits. Particles were visible, drifting in the thick air. Yeah. I feel like I can feel it on my fingers. I know, I know. By the second evening of the fog, ambulance calls had increased by a third, and this
33:51 Speaker 03 is when they could still be dispatched, spoilers, and the temperatures dropped even lower, leading to more burning coal and more smoke filling the skies. By December 6th, which was a Saturday, conditions hadn't changed, and the fog was finally getting some press coverage, although none that adequately conveyed the severity of the situation. Mostly, it was complaints about traffic and sporting events being canceled and the higher criminal activity under the fog. Ah, of course, the guise of fog. Yeah. Well, and if, so just, here's my little pedantic insert about The Crown. I watched the episode, and in it, there's like very much immediately alarm for the health of Londoners.
34:35 Speaker 03 And it was like, what is this fog gonna do? People aren't gonna be able to breathe. Like, that part was very... Pressing and immediate-
34:43 Speaker 01 In the show.
34:44 Speaker 03 In the show.
34:44 Speaker 01 Okay.
34:45 Speaker 03 That is not what the immediate concern was during the time of the smog. And even in the, like, the weeks that followed, it took a long time for people to realize the health effects.
34:55 Speaker 01 Okay.
34:56 Speaker 03 During the smog, the headlines would have much, would have been a lot more about like, you know, businesses are suffering because of this. Like, that was sort of the vibe.
35:04 Speaker 01 Right.
35:05 Speaker 03 There was-
35:06 Speaker 01 The, like, annoyance of everything being disrupted and the, like, economic concerns, but not so much the health concerns in real life-
35:13 Speaker 03 In real time.
35:14 Speaker 01 During the moment.
35:14 Speaker 03 Yes, yeah.
35:15 Speaker 01 Okay.
35:15 Speaker 03 And there's a part in the episode where, spoilers if you haven't seen it, it's Churchill's secretary gets hit by a bus and dies because she can't see, she doesn't know if she's in the street or not. That wouldn't have happened because traffic was ground to a stop.
35:33 Speaker 01 Oh, okay.
35:33 Speaker 03 And also, I don't think she existed. Anyway, um, sorry, that's my well actually corner over-
35:38 Speaker 01 I love it.
35:39 Speaker 03 I'm sorry, I'm not trying to be like a fun sucker. I'm just like, I just want to be, you know, truthful.
35:46 Speaker 01 You've watched movies with me. I am a total fun sucker.
35:49 Speaker 03 You are, you are, but it's like fun. It's a, it's a fun way of being a fun sucker.
35:53 Speaker 01 Like, ugh, this wouldn't have, I really kept my mouth shut watching The Pit, actually, I was proud of myself. Very few times did I allow myself to talk out loud.
36:02 Speaker 03 Okay, well, let's watch ER together and we'll see if your story stays the same. If you're able to be like, another rib spreader, are you kidding me?
36:09 Speaker 01 Not for that, not for that long. Let's be real.
36:12 Speaker 03 I swear, rib spreaders in every single episode multiple times. Is that-
36:16 Speaker 01 In the ER?
36:17 Speaker 03 In the ER, yeah, all the time, all the time.
36:19 Speaker 01 No, no.
36:21 Speaker 03 Okay. Back to the smog.
36:23 Speaker 01 Back to the great smog, please.
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38:57 Speaker 03 But, okay, so there were some doctors, though, during this time, during the great smog, that were issued a PSA that were like, okay, if you have any sort of respiratory conditions, leave, get out of town, if you can. But like, who could actually do that?
39:10 Speaker 01 That's easy to do when there's traffic is ground to a stop.
39:13 Speaker 03 Traffic's ground to a stop. I need to work. I can't afford to do this. You know, like, there's a lot of, yeah.
39:18 Speaker 01 Okay.
39:20 Speaker 03 Uh, sulfur dioxide levels reached 550 parts per million and smoked had increased from 400 micrograms per cubic meter to 1,600. Um, now, I know that you're gonna get into, like, what those numbers actually mean, but it's a lot. Like, these concentrations were so high that the instruments actually could not measure them accurately. They were off the scale. Like, it was just like, oh, we have no, we can't measure this anymore. It's above this. And yet, the smoke continued to flow from houses, from factories, from power plants. It was a really cold December.
39:52 Speaker 01 Yeah.
39:53 Speaker 03 Healthcare workers struggled to keep up with the patients pouring into their hospitals with pneumonia, bronchitis, tuberculosis, heart failure, and asthma attacks. A few older doctors said it reminded them of the 1918 influenza pandemic, with so many people gasping for breath on the wards and every bed full. And many more suffered at home because they weren't willing or able to venture out into the fog. And people began to die. But nowhere on any death certificate could the word "smog" be found. Instead, it was acute respiratory failure or heart disease. And in retrospect, acute respiratory failure due to smog would probably be the most accurate description.
40:37 Speaker 03 Visibility dropped to a yard. Traffic stopped entirely, which also meant ambulances were grounded, unable to navigate in the thick fog. Anyone who stepped outside into the freezing temperatures, like, you know how that happens, and you instantly inhale, and then you're already coughing because it's so cold?
40:55 Speaker 01 Right.
40:56 Speaker 03 You're doing that, but you're inhaling this toxic smog, and you're choking on that frigid air, and coughing and whooping.
41:04 Speaker 03 And so it went Saturday night into Sunday, Sunday into Monday, December 8th. And fog stories began to circulate. And police officer that was standing right outside a storefront heard the crash of windows from a burglar breaking in, but he couldn't see them, so they escaped. A duck flew into a man, neither able to see the other.
41:25 Speaker 01 Okay.
41:26 Speaker 03 The dog racing track had to be shut down because the dogs could actually catch the mechanical hair. The guy who was guiding it, like on his little machine, he couldn't see in the fog. So the dogs were like, okay, we caught it. What do we do now?
41:40 Speaker 01 Okay.
41:41 Speaker 03 The performance of La Traviata in a North London theater was stopped abruptly after the lead star couldn't sing, she was choking during her first aria, and then the conductor couldn't see past the first row of musicians because his eyes were burning.
41:55 Speaker 01 It's just so wild to think about people's trying to like do life.
42:00 Speaker 03 Right. And they're like, this is just how it's supposed to be. Like, it's another, I think it speaks a lot to sort of the, and maybe we'll talk about this later on, but like the insidiousness of this and how, how easy it is in some respects to be like, oh, it's bad. It's a little bit worse than yesterday. It's a little bit worse than yesterday. It's a little bit, and then you just keep going on and then you're like, when you're in the midst of it, I think it's hard to realize just how bad it is.
42:30 Speaker 01 Right. You have to be able to like take yourself out and like look back and be like, oh, that's, we shouldn't have been just living with that.
42:38 Speaker 03 Yes. Yeah. And then in retrospect, you're like, how did, how, how was this allowed to happen for so, so long?
42:46 Speaker 01 Right.
42:47 Speaker 03 But yeah, a few more fog stories. So there was a milkman who walked six miles through the fog on his usual rounds, but he collapsed and died on his way back, less than a mile from his depot. Just collapsed. At the Smithfield livestock show, 11 cattle died and 150 more had trouble breathing in the toxic air. This was, these were the deaths that were actually most reported on during the smog and like in the weeks after. It was these, because it was so, it was like. I think extreme and it was visible. And so it was like these were a lot of these cows were brought in from out of London and then suddenly they're dying and they're like expensive cows or something.
43:29 Speaker 01 And it's like all at once.
43:30 Speaker 03 It's all at once. Yeah. So it was much more of like a visible, here's this contained thing. All these cows are having trouble breathing. That's weird.
43:38 Speaker 01 That's weird.
43:38 Speaker 03 And even though you're, you're also having trouble breathing. But I, I did read in another firsthand account in this from that, that symposium that someone was like, you know, it was a child or like a young man during this. And he's like, I remember my father and many men my father's age all had bronchitis. Like it was one of the most chronic, yes, chronic conditions, just from like life, working in factories, in the war, stuff like that. And so I think it was like, yeah, smoking, the expectation of bronchitis was like, well, yeah, of course you're going to have a hard time breathing. But
44:13 Speaker 01 Right.
44:14 Speaker 03 Yeah.
44:15 Speaker 01 So it was like they, I wonder if that, it's interesting to think about like the Crown's representation of being very worried about the health effects. And I feel like it's, it's a lot harder to put yourself in those shoes, right? Of like, we didn't really know as much about the health effects and everyone was sicker to begin with. So it's like, maybe just to make it believable for watching something today, they had to be like, look, we, we would be worried about this if it happened today.
44:45 Speaker 03 Don't, don't worry. We see this happening. Yeah. I mean, it also just makes for better drama, like
44:50 Speaker 01 Right, right, right. Yeah.
44:51 Speaker 03 Churchill is not a fit leader, blah, blah, blah. You know, like that kind of thing.
44:55 Speaker 01 So, yeah.
44:56 Speaker 03 But yeah.
44:57 Speaker 01 Okay.
44:57 Speaker 03 So when the smog finally lifted on Tuesday, December 9th, those stories, like we've talked about, those were the, the ones making front page news
45:07 Speaker 01 Okay.
45:07 Speaker 03 in the weeks that followed. The cost was illustrated more by like these quippy little anecdotes or the, the economic costs, like businesses that had to shut their doors or by the inconvenience that the smoke, the smog caused. Traffic stopped, rugby matches canceled. The true human toll was yet to be calculated. And when it finally was, it revealed a catastrophe. 12,000 people had died as a result of the smog.
45:37 Speaker 01 Wow.
45:38 Speaker 03 12,000 and thousands more would suffer long-term respiratory issues.
45:44 Speaker 03 The great smog of 1952 had a lasting and profound impact on air quality regulations around the globe. But before I get into the fallout of this public health crisis, I'll turn it over to you, Erin, to tell me like, why people were getting so sick? What is it about the smog that was making them sick and killing them?
46:04 Speaker 01 Yeah, I will try. In order to try and explain what the smog was doing to people, I want to take a quick step back to talk a little bit about like fog and smog more generally.
46:22 Speaker 03 Ooh, weather lesson.
46:23 Speaker 01 Weather, yeah, I mean, not really, because when I started getting deep into like meteorological literature, it was quite quickly overwhelmed. And I still don't understand anticyclones and inversions and advection or something else.
46:36 Speaker 03 Oh, gosh. Yeah, no idea.
46:38 Speaker 01 But we're gonna, we're gonna do what we can. Okay. So you had kind of alluded to this, Erin. There are parts of the world, London, you know, the UK being one of them, here in San Diego being another, San Francisco being another very classic, where fog is prone to form. So let's talk a little bit about what that formation of fog looks like. Typically, the air closest to the surface of the earth is the warmest air, right? Because the sun is warming our earth. And then through that like heat transfer, the surface of our earth warms the air that's closest to it. And typically, warm air rises, and it continuously rises into the atmosphere.
47:21 Speaker 01 And cold air higher up in the atmosphere will sink. And this creates
47:26 Speaker 03 It's because warm, Erin, physics. Okay, that's enough for me.
47:32 Speaker 01 And this kind of turbulent mixing, what it usually does is carry off most of our ground level pollution higher up into the atmosphere. That's what typically happens.
47:41 Speaker 03 Yeah.
47:42 Speaker 01 It is, isn't it? But sometimes we can see what's called an inversion event where under the right conditions, there is a pocket of warm air that sits higher up in the atmosphere. These conditions might include like warm air coming off the ocean and sort of popping up onto land and sitting just a little bit higher so that the air closest to the earth is actually cooler and often wet. Okay. And because of this, we see little to no mixing of the air and we can get fog formation. This warm air on top is like a cap where the cold air can't rise above it because it's more dense than this warm air up above. And so it's just like condensed air, humidity, et cetera. Exactly. More water is held.
48:27 Speaker 01 It's this little, super saturated pocket that can result in fog. Okay. And smog, as you alluded to Erin, is a combination of smoke and fog. So when these masses of air get trapped low down in our atmosphere, they're trapping all of our atmospheric pollutants along with them, meaning we have both particulate and gaseous pollutants that are trapped inside this fog layer. And it turns out that particulate matter, like what is released extremely, like very high quantities with coal burning especially, particulate matter can serve as a nucleation site, basically, where water can condense around these teeny tiny aerosolized particles
49:12 Speaker 01 and then be even more apt to form fog, which we now call smog. Okay, okay. So everything's just sort of sitting there and not going anywhere because there's nothing to blow it off, nothing to burn it off. Exactly. And that is exactly what we saw happen in London in the winter of 1952. There was also on top of it, kind of a perfect storm of conditions that led to this. That winter was particularly cold in London, which meant that more people were using more of this nutty slack coal to keep their houses warm. Additionally, that summer, the summer before, the electric trams in London had been switched
49:53 Speaker 01 out in favor of diesel buses, which were giving a lot more pollution into the air.
49:58 Speaker 03 Not good, yeah.
49:59 Speaker 01 And so even apart from this particular fog smog event, it was estimated that every 24 hours between these coal-fired chimneys and the diesel tailpipes, there was at least 1,000 tons of smoke, 2,000 tons of carbon dioxide, and somewhere between estimates I saw ranged between 370 and 3,000 tons of sulfur dioxide, as well as carbon monoxide, nitrogen dioxide, other heavy metals, and more being spewed into the atmosphere around London. On top of that, you had this meteorological phenomenon that happened, right? The fog.
50:39 Speaker 01 You had these toxic products of combustion, this coal heating, the diesel buses, exacerbated by these cold weather conditions. And what you mentioned, Erin, the kind of long-term aftermath of World War II and all of the things that have been going on in London this year, it was a perfect storm.
50:56 Speaker 03 So like, this would have been, I mean, I just, it sounds like the air was pretty toxic regardless, but then when it's all sitting there, it's extra bad.
51:08 Speaker 01 Exactly. It's not, it's just not moving, right? So instead of any of this being blown away and you're only exposed to, you know, the immediacy of it, you're being exposed to multiple days' worth just chopped on top of each other. So you had mentioned some of these numbers, Erin. 12,000 people were estimated to have died in total due to this smog. If we break it down a little bit further, it's estimated that 4,000 more people died in London on average just during those four to five days of the smog itself?
51:43 Speaker 01 With 8,000 more people dying from long-term effects over the next three months due to this fog. And this is, again, four and 8,000, 12,000 total, more deaths than the baseline. Right. It's not like 12,000 people died in two and a half months. It's on top of what is historic average. Yeah. Average historic. And no age group was spared entirely. Deaths in adults almost tripled. The mortality of newborns doubled, and those ages one to 12 months more than doubled. Deaths in children rose by half, and in young adults by two-thirds. And overall, about half of the increase in deaths was attributable to either bronchitis or pneumonia, with deaths
52:28 Speaker 01 from bronchitis increasing eight to 10 times, based on different estimates, and pneumonia deaths increasing by at least three times. We also saw increases in deaths that were reported as respiratory tuberculosis, cancer of the lung, coronary disease, myocardial degeneration, and the nebulous category of other respiratory diseases. Influenza deaths also increased during this time, although I think this is a little bit contentious, because at some point, the government tried to say that most of these deaths were due to- They were like, "Oh, it was influenza epidemic. It wasn't smog." But there was no influenza epidemic at the time, so- There was not. But plus, you also have to think that, like, even if flu, certainly flu was circulating,
53:11 Speaker 01 right? It's flu season. Exposure to these pollutants certainly would leave a person more susceptible to a severe infection afterwards or during the event. We also saw increases just in hospital admissions, apart from the death rate. We saw a 163% increase in respiratory disease hospital admissions and a 48% increase in total hospital admissions. And that's just for people who could actually get to the hospital. So what was it that was doing all of this? Yeah. We both- Smog. Yeah, smog. I mean, honestly, yes, that's the answer, Erin.
53:49 Speaker 01 Because we both know and don't know more specific than just to be able to say smog. Okay.
53:55 Speaker 03 Okay.
53:55 Speaker 01 During the early 1950s, the only routine air quality measurements that were being taken were of smoke, which is essentially the concentration of suspended particulate matter.
54:04 Speaker 03 And that's mostly from coal smoke or like from other things too?
54:08 Speaker 01 It's other things too, but primarily coal smoke, especially in London.
54:11 Speaker 03 Okay.
54:11 Speaker 01 Like it was mostly from coal.
54:13 Speaker 03 Okay.
54:13 Speaker 01 But all they could measure was that smoke, suspended particulates and sulfur dioxide. The maximum daily recorded concentrations of the smoke and the sulfur dioxide during this four day smog event, like you mentioned, Erin, were incredible. They actually peaked at 10 to 12 times higher than what was typical for the time. And these are certainly underestimates because of just how overwhelmed the filters that were monitoring air quality actually became.
54:42 Speaker 03 God, it reminds me kind of of like Chernobyl when they're first measuring and they're like, wow, this is really high numbers. And you realize that the little detectors are only detected, they're maxed out.
54:53 Speaker 01 Exactly.
54:54 Speaker 03 And so it's like, we know it was at least 10 times higher.
54:57 Speaker 01 Exactly.
54:58 Speaker 03 But how many times actually was it higher?
55:00 Speaker 01 Yeah, it's like when I do a point of care A1C and it just says like over 12%. And I'm like, well, what does that mean? Then we get a real one. But anyways, um, so yes, so it was really bad. The average during that fog, so not just looking at the peak, but even the average concentrations during that smog event were five to six times the typical average for smoke and sulfur dioxide. And I'm not getting into the nitty gritty on the numbers here because they're, they're hard to kind of conceptualize. But the other thing is that we couldn't measure all of the other known pollutants because coal smoke and diesel engines also release a ton of other pollutants that certainly contributed to the respiratory and cardiac issues that we saw.
55:45 Speaker 01 We can assume, if we assume that the concentrations of the other pollutants increased kind of in proportion to smog or to the smoke and the sulfur dioxide.
55:57 Speaker 03 Right.
55:57 Speaker 01 Then we would have seen significant increases in carbon monoxide, carbon dioxide, nitrogen dioxide, as well as heavy metals and other contaminants of this coal especially. On top of that, Erin, because we're not done. Some proportion of just the sulfur released by burning this coal would have been sulfur trioxide, so with three oxygens instead of two.
56:24 Speaker 03 Sounds even worse than sulfur dioxide.
56:26 Speaker 01 Right. The reason that it's worse.
56:28 Speaker 03 Hydroxide, no.
56:30 Speaker 01 The reason that it's worse, though, Erin, is because when that mixes with water in the air, it becomes sulfuric acid. And so on top of just some amount of sulfur dioxide being produced, sulfur dioxide could have been oxidized to sulfur trioxide. So basically, you can think of this fog also containing sulfuric acid mist as some proportion of it.
56:54 Speaker 03 Like a, that's horrifying.
56:56 Speaker 01 Yes. I mean, that's acid rain, right? Except it was acid mist.
56:59 Speaker 03 Yeah.
57:00 Speaker 01 And the smoke itself was also not just one thing, right? It is soot, which can be like carbonaceous and like non-carbonaceous little particles that are really, really, really fine. But we also saw fly ash, which is that ultrafine type of ash that comes up out of your chimneys, but also salt, gypsum, heavy metals, like I said. And the elevated levels of air pollution were not only seen during this event, they actually lasted for at least two months after this smog event as well. And sulfur dioxide tends to get a lot of the attention when it comes to what was the ultimate cause of people's deaths?
57:44 Speaker 01 Why did we see so many deaths?
57:46 Speaker 03 Yeah.
57:46 Speaker 01 But in truth, it's not just sulfur dioxide. And this is where things get a little bit kind of like confusing and difficult and why I'm not focusing as much on the like, how many parts per million are we talking? Because when we look at a lot of our data on like exposure to these gases like sulfur dioxide comes from animal studies and studies where we're looking at occupational exposures. And in a lot of cases, including this great smog event, the concentrations in the atmosphere were likely not high enough that you would expect, based on our animal studies and occupational risk like thresholds, you would not necessarily expect significant effects just from sulfur
58:31 Speaker 01 dioxide alone. However. There's clear data, epidemiological data and from this event that increases in sulfur dioxide from these kind of pollutants, increases mortality, increases respiratory complications. So something is clearly missing in this story.
58:50 Speaker 03 Right.
58:51 Speaker 01 And really what it is, is that it is not the one thing. It's a combination of all of these.
58:55 Speaker 03 Right.
58:56 Speaker 01 So one of the things that we see is that the particulate matter in this smoke likely plays a huge role as well as the synergistic effects of the sulfur dioxide, its conversion into sulfuric acid and these smoke particles.
59:12 Speaker 03 It's not just the individual, it's not just some of the parts. It's more than the sum of the parts. It's all of these things interacting together.
59:20 Speaker 01 Exactly, exactly.
59:21 Speaker 03 I guess that's what synergistic means, yeah.
59:23 Speaker 01 Right. Yeah, but that, but that, but that is what it is. Like we could just
59:26 Speaker 03 In way more words, yeah.
59:27 Speaker 01 Keep saying it so that it, so that it's emphasized, right? Because one of the things that we see is that some of this particulate matter, it can get really down deep into our alveoli, right? It can cross over into our bloodstream, which can potentially cause inflammation. It can cause damage to the lungs itself, resulting in both short and long-term respiratory issues. We know that asthma prevalence was higher in the cohort of people exposed as babies to the great smog. And that particulate matter making it so deep, we think maybe helps some of these gaseous pollutants actually make their way deeper into our lungs and have more of an effect themselves than they would if they were alone in the air.
1:00:11 Speaker 03 That makes sense. Yeah.
1:00:13 Speaker 01 And of course, on top of that, there was increases in carbon dioxide. So carbon monoxide, how much of a role was that also playing? You've got an increase in carbon monoxide. Your oxygen isn't being shunted as efficiently because your blood cells are covered in carbon monoxide. So like, there's all of these things that are playing a role together. So we can't say it was this one thing. It was all of these things.
1:00:38 Speaker 03 All of these things.
1:00:39 Speaker 01 That led to significant respiratory and cardiovascular effects that we still see today from exposures to smog. And we still don't like, we, we can't as easily break down, here's the one thing, because it's not, it's the combination of all of these things.
1:00:55 Speaker 03 It's all of the things together. We can't disentangle. Yeah.
1:00:58 Speaker 01 Yeah.
1:00:59 Speaker 03 Yeah.
1:00:59 Speaker 01 So Erin, since we can't disentangle it and we're still dealing with it, can you tell me a little bit more about how the great smog of 1952 has affected how we think about air quality today?
1:01:14 Speaker 03 The fallout? Absolutely. Yeah. Let's, let's do it.
1:01:19 Speaker 03 From what you just told us, Erin, it is easy to see why the death toll from the great smog was as high as it was, 12,000 people. We know a lot more, even though we don't have the full picture, but we do know a lot more now than we did back then about how air pollution can be terrible for our health. That wasn't clear, almost at all, back in the early months of 1953, when public health officials began to examine the full impact of that terrible smog event. For centuries, people had connected the dots between pollution and bad health. Like, it's, it would be hard to overlook that. I mean, miasma, right?
1:01:57 Speaker 01 Miasma, yeah.
1:01:59 Speaker 03 Which is more nuanced than that, but still, that was part of it.
1:02:02 Speaker 01 Right.
1:02:02 Speaker 03 But, but the question of can coal smoke or smog actually kill people, it remained an, an open question, in part because no one knew exactly what the mechanism would be. And I think because of how you just explained it, it's, it's reasonable to be like, well, we don't quite know. It's all these things together.
1:02:20 Speaker 01 Right.
1:02:21 Speaker 03 And I think there was another question of like, well, did someone die because of the fog, or did the fog just exacerbate an underlying health problem, bringing someone a little closer to death? And if that's the case, like, what do you put on the death certificate? This is, I think, was a contentious issue also during COVID, but it's like, if the smog hadn't existed.
1:02:41 Speaker 01 Yeah.
1:02:41 Speaker 03 Would this person have survived that week?
1:02:44 Speaker 01 Right. Certainly, people with either pre-existing heart or lung conditions were more susceptible, absolutely.
1:02:51 Speaker 03 Yeah.
1:02:51 Speaker 01 But that, there's still.
1:02:53 Speaker 03 What was all the smog?
1:02:54 Speaker 01 The smog, yeah.
1:02:55 Speaker 03 The smog, yeah.
1:02:58 Speaker 03 And so, yeah, like, like you said, it was looking at historic averages that helped people to see, okay, there was an actually a huge increase than compared to past years.
1:03:08 Speaker 01 Yeah.
1:03:08 Speaker 03 And so, um, just, just like to, to illustrate this too, like, after, when, when people were finally looking at this and coming to terms, uh, they were getting angry. One coroner wrote, quote, "This fog was a killer and wiped out a great number of people who would have otherwise survived with their chronic bronchitis and emphysema, damaged hearts, etc. What are our wonderful scientists doing in an age of jet propulsion, atomic energy? These wretched people can't solve the problem of a lousy fog," end quote. It's harsh.
1:03:46 Speaker 01 It is harsh.
1:03:46 Speaker 03 Um, I think it's, it's, I understand where he's coming from to some degree, right? Because it's like, yeah, we are making huge technological advancements in so many areas, and yet people are still dying from a centuries-old problem. What are we doing here? You know?
1:04:02 Speaker 01 I can, I can feel some of that today.
1:04:04 Speaker 03 Uh, yeah. I mean, I think this is where that, uh, a good deal of that rage is misdirected, right? Because I'm sure that scientists would have been more than happy to, more than willing to solve the problem of smog, but what was really holding them back was politicians and the corporations, industry.
1:04:23 Speaker 01 Uh huh.
1:04:24 Speaker 03 And so maybe that question would have been better phrased as, what are our wonderful politicians doing? And the answer would be stalling, denying, downplaying. Not all, of course. Hashtag not all politicians. There were a few politicians. I can't, I have to not do that. I hate it.
1:04:41 Speaker 01 I really liked it, actually.
1:04:43 Speaker 03 Really?
1:04:48 Speaker 03 There were a few politicians in the Labour Party, namely Norman Dodds, who stood up against the Conservatives in power, demanding that the fog deaths be investigated and that step should be taken to ensure that something like this never happened again. Naturally, the Conservative Party was reluctant to take on any responsibility, holding on to their claims that nutty slack was perfectly safe to burn, that it was just the excessive cold and damp that led to the increase in deaths, that it was just, it was just weather, Erin, it was weather.
1:05:18 Speaker 01 Yeah, cold and damp, it's your phlegm.
1:05:21 Speaker 03 It's your, it's just your phlegm acting up, you know? You know, take some emetics or something, don't do that.
1:05:27 Speaker 01 Don't do that.
1:05:27 Speaker 03 But this, this delay tactic, this denial tactic, it wouldn't work for too long. News of the smog had traveled around the world and the US government actually reached out to the British Ministry of Health, requesting documents about the smog to help them in their own investigation of air pollution and health. Because the 1952 Great Smog, although it was the most severe, it wasn't an isolated event. In 1930, in Belgium, a similar set of weather circumstances that faced London led to a toxic smog settling over an industrialized valley, killing 60 people and sickening thousands. And in 1948, in Pennsylvania, a toxic fog crept in over an industry town,
1:06:11 Speaker 03 choking residents' lungs with hydrogen fluoride and sulfur dioxide from the zinc factory and other factories in the area doing other things. In that smog event, 20 people and 800 animals died and it really woke up the US to the air pollution crisis. And so their interest in the 1952 smog was motivated by this and understanding how this happened so that we can do something to prevent it. The British Ministry of Health was horrified that the UK would be one step behind the US when it came to these matters. And so they quickly issued a questionnaire to the families of those who had died during the smog week.
1:06:53 Speaker 03 And certain symptoms popped up time and again, things like vomiting, chronic chest trouble, headaches, delirium, exhaustion, chronic coughing, pain after drinking water, things like that. And so initial estimates kept being revised down by the Conservative Party. So it was like, well, we think that 6,000 people died in December. And they're like, all of December? Do we really need to count all of December? Let's bring it down. But like even, even just looking at the smog days, it is, the numbers are staggering. Like you said, it was estimated to be about 4,000.
1:07:26 Speaker 01 Right.
1:07:27 Speaker 03 I, in the first 24 hours, we can kind of break this down even more. For, the first 24 hours, 400 people died. Day two, 600 people. Day three, 900. Day four, another 900. Day five, the final day, 800. And again, these are excess deaths.
1:07:42 Speaker 01 Right. Excess. On top of the historic average over the last like several years.
1:07:48 Speaker 03 Yeah. Deaths that would not have happened if the smog had not happened.
1:07:51 Speaker 01 Exactly.
1:07:52 Speaker 03 Yeah. During that time, there were hospitalizations, extra claims for sickness benefits, and it's hard to imagine that a single person in London would have been unaffected in some way, untouched in some way by the fog, right? Whether it was a family member themselves, someone else they knew, their work, anything.
1:08:12 Speaker 01 Yeah.
1:08:13 Speaker 03 And after months, the fog, the smog was finally getting the press that it deserved with headlines like London Fog Deaths, Investigations in Progress, and clamor rises in London for smog relief. Because what the heck were people supposed to do the next year?
1:08:31 Speaker 01 Yeah.
1:08:32 Speaker 03 Right? The Conservative government was hesitant to criticize the coal industry or to look for alternative fuel solutions because A, it's too expensive, and B, don't bite the hand that feeds you. Delay and denial was the name of the game. Londoners had brought this on themselves. They should be buying better coal. False. Excuse me? How could they? You told me I can't. Right. Oh, we don't have enough data yet to make a decision. Also false. That's never true. Oh, we're not sure which component of the smog might be an issue. We're not, it's not clear that it is an issue. Also false. They had the data. The data existed in a confidential report stating that sulfur dioxide
1:09:12 Speaker 03 levels were astronomical. And as you discussed, we know that it's not just sulfur dioxide, but it is still, it plays a role. Huge role, huge role. Don't get me wrong. And the thing is, the delay tactic did work for a while, much to the frustration of Dods and other members of the Labour Party who were really pushing for, you know, accountability and also the National Smoke Abatement Society, who was like, we've been saying for years. Hello.
1:09:43 Speaker 03 By late spring of 1953, the smog had taken a backseat to massive floods, the budget crisis, and a serial killer murdering people in London, primarily, actually, women. Yep. Oh, okay. If you're interested, if you're a true crime person, John Reginald Christie is the name. And actually, the book that I read to do most of my research for this called Death in the Air tells like the simultaneous story of John Reginald Christie and the great smog. Interesting. Anyway, but the proposed solutions for 1953 in case of another smog event, they were insufficient. It was like, well, we'll hand out respirators to those who need them. We'll give out masks. Actually, we'll sell masks,
1:10:24 Speaker 03 which were ineffective. They were tested and found to be ineffective. And they were like, yeah, that's whatever. We'll do it anyway. It's a nice, it's a nice visual thing that'll give people a sense of security. So they'll go outside more and breathe in more toxic air. Devise a meteorological warning system, which actually was a good idea, banning the burning of trash, decreased driving, stay inside during smog events, largely reactive solutions, with the exception of the meteorological warning system. And so thousands of Londoners were now facing winter of 1953 with respiratory issues that they did not have the year before and little guidance on how to protect themselves. The government had formed a committee, actually I think multiple committees.
1:11:09 Speaker 03 The Beaver Committee was the primary one, to determine the extent of the 1952 smog health and economic impacts and to better understand the link between pollution and health.
1:11:19 Speaker 01 Okay.
1:11:20 Speaker 03 The first interim report was released in late 1953 and it was really sobering, right? The economic costs of pollution were massive, hundreds of millions of pounds, and prolonged exposure to the smog could lead to long-term health effects. And the final death toll over the two and a half months following the first day of the smog was found in a tiny little graph to be 12,000, three times the initial estimate.
1:11:47 Speaker 01 Yeah.
1:11:48 Speaker 03 But this number, this 12,000 number, it disappeared in later versions of the report. And I don't know if that was like, an intentional omission, or just like, people didn't, it didn't register for most people who read this interim report?
1:12:02 Speaker 01 It's like, they put it in the teeniest, tiniest part of the
1:12:04 Speaker 03 Yeah.
1:12:05 Speaker 01 Something, and suddenly, sketchy.
1:12:08 Speaker 03 And so, for decades after, the line was that 4,000 people died in the smog event, and that was it.
1:12:17 Speaker 01 They just only looked at that initial number?
1:12:19 Speaker 03 Yeah.
1:12:20 Speaker 01 And ignored the fact that you have to look at the next couple of months?
1:12:23 Speaker 03 The long, the next couple of months, yeah.
1:12:25 Speaker 01 Oh, great.
1:12:26 Speaker 03 And so, it wasn't until almost 50 years later, in 2001, when epidemiologists examined deaths and illnesses during this time, that the 12,000 number resurfaced as like, no, this is actually what we think was the true human toll of the Great Smog.
1:12:42 Speaker 01 Oh my gosh.
1:12:43 Speaker 03 In addition to 100,000 cases of respiratory illness. But yeah, even, even with those staggering numbers omitted from the report, the need for preventative, not just reactive, solutions to the problem of air pollution was clear. Things like smokeless chimneys, alternative heating methods, and fortunately, a smog like that scene in 1952 did not return in 1953, or in the years that followed.
1:13:13 Speaker 03 And the passage of the 1956 Clean Air Act helped to ensure this. And this Clean Air Act did incorporate many of the recommendations that were laid out in the Beaver Committee report. And this also is, was a, like a really monumental piece of legislature. It was the world's first air pollution legislation. And it wasn't perfect by any means. A lot of people were like, this could have been stronger. This could have been this or that, you know?
1:13:43 Speaker 01 Yeah.
1:13:43 Speaker 03 You can't make everyone happy. But it did provide a path forward, and not just for the UK, but really the rest of the world. And many countries ended up passing their own air quality legislation over the following decades, inspired by the 1956 Clean Air Act. I mean, this did not mean that smog went away at all. Londoners continued to get sick or die from polluted air, including in December of 1991, when an estimated 150 people died in a smog event. And air pollution remains a global problem. Like, it has not gone away.
1:14:19 Speaker 01 Uh, World Health Organization estimates that 6.7 million deaths worldwide each year are caused by air pollution.
1:14:26 Speaker 03 Thousands of people every day.
1:14:28 Speaker 01 Yeah. Yep.
1:14:29 Speaker 03 Yeah. And we, we will definitely cover air pollution, other aspects of air pollution in the future on this podcast. Air Quality Index, we've been wanting to do that for a while.
1:14:40 Speaker 01 Thank you, Kenton.
1:14:41 Speaker 03 Thank you, Kenton. Yeah, there's, there's a lot, there's a lot more to cover when it comes to air pollution. But this, I feel like, was sort of a big turning point.
1:14:49 Speaker 01 Yeah.
1:14:49 Speaker 03 And, and I think that for me, like, the, I was trying to think of take homes, like, what does a great smog mean to me? What can we learn from a great smog? And there's like, a lot, but, you know?
1:14:59 Speaker 01 Yeah.
1:14:59 Speaker 03 But I think that, like, it, it shows how easy it is to be complacent when there's no visible crisis, when there's no, like, apparent crisis. And the Great Smog Event, in retrospect, was a crisis, but at the time, people did not realize it.
1:15:14 Speaker 01 Right.
1:15:14 Speaker 03 And they had been living, and part of it is because they'd been living with this fog, this smog, for years.
1:15:20 Speaker 01 Yeah.
1:15:20 Speaker 03 And part of the reason for that complacency, too, I think, is because The smog did not hit people equally.
1:15:29 Speaker 01 Hmm.
1:15:29 Speaker 03 There, that did tend to affect those who are the more disadvantaged. Whether it was because maybe they had chronic bronchitis because they had worked in factories, because they couldn't afford to, you know, have a white collar office job or something like that.
1:15:45 Speaker 01 You know, and you know, even worse types of chimneys or even worse quality coal or.
1:15:50 Speaker 03 Where they lived, that too, because the smog was also not evenly distributed in the city.
1:15:55 Speaker 01 Yeah.
1:15:56 Speaker 03 And also just that, like, it all comes back to public health because I'm just like, why?
1:16:01 Speaker 01 Doesn't it always?
1:16:02 Speaker 03 We need prevention, not reaction. Like, I mean, reaction is important, but prevention, it makes everything so much better.
1:16:11 Speaker 01 Yeah, but I mean, it is, it is interesting to think about how, like, when we, when you tell this story now, it feels so clear that it was in fact a catastrophe during the moment.
1:16:20 Speaker 03 Right.
1:16:20 Speaker 01 But it's really interesting to try and understand a time when, in the moment, it just felt like a slightly worse version of what you're used to.
1:16:30 Speaker 03 Right.
1:16:31 Speaker 01 And so it's hard to understand the feeling of like, oh, we didn't realize how bad of a catastrophe it was until way after.
1:16:40 Speaker 03 Yeah.
1:16:40 Speaker 01 It's so, so interesting to try and, like, I wonder how many, never mind, I know exactly how many catastrophes we're living through right now with feeling like we're not realizing how bad of a catastrophe it is. Hello, climate change.
1:16:52 Speaker 03 Hello, everything. I know. And that's the thing. I think it's, it comes, kind of comes back to this, like, idea of reaction. Is that, like, do we have to wait for a catastrophe? Do we have to wait?
1:17:02 Speaker 01 Right.
1:17:02 Speaker 03 For 12,000 people to die in a smog event before doing something about this? Like, the Smoke Abatement Society would have, or whatever, they would have very strongly disagreed with that. They've been trying for decades to be like, we don't need a catastrophe to do something.
1:17:15 Speaker 01 We know what the problem is. Right. Oh, gosh. Now I'm feeling a lot of feelings.
1:17:20 Speaker 03 Sorry.
1:17:22 Speaker 03 On that happy note.
1:17:24 Speaker 01 And if you want to know more.
1:17:26 Speaker 03 Yeah. There's, I've got some sources. I have some papers, including, I do, I did really enjoy the firsthand account, sort of the symposium. But the main source that I used was a book titled Death in the Air: The True Story of a Serial Killer, the Great London Smog, and the Strangling of a City by Kate Winkler Dawson.
1:17:45 Speaker 01 Okay.
1:17:46 Speaker 03 It's a great read, yeah.
1:17:47 Speaker 01 I actually read a lot of old papers for this, which is fun. I don't usually read old papers.
1:17:51 Speaker 03 Love old papers.
1:17:53 Speaker 01 But I've got one from 1953 that was from The Lancet, The Mortality in the London Fog Incident 1952. And then another one from 1954, from the Journal of the Royal Sanitary Institute, that was called Air Pollution and the London Fog of December 1952. But also some of those update ones that you had mentioned, Erin, the 2001, that was the reassessment of the lethal London fog of 1952. And then another one from 2008, that was like comparing the role of influenza versus pollution. And then a few others. You can find all of them on our website, thispodcastwillkillyou.com, under the Episodes tab.
1:18:28 Speaker 03 You certainly can. Big thank you to Blood Mobile for providing the music for this episode and all of our episodes.
1:18:35 Speaker 01 Thank you to Tom and Leanna and Brent and Pete and Jessica and everyone who is, helps us make this podcast possible.
1:18:44 Speaker 03 Yes, yeah. Truly, truly thank you. And a big thank you also to our listeners and our patrons. Your support, it means the world to us. It, we make this podcast for you. And please, always, we, we want to know what you think.
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1:19:01 Speaker 03 Let us know. Well, until next time, wash your hands.
1:19:05 Speaker 01 You filthy animals.
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