Transcripts For PRESSTV Documentary 20240703 : vimarsana.com

PRESSTV Documentary July 3, 2024

Planets atmosphere have transformed history. These are the stories of weather that changed the world. Dunora pennsylvania, a small town 28 miles south of pitsburg, once vital part of Americas Industrial heartland. Thousands of tons of steel and zinc produced here helped give america the machines it needed to fight world war ii, and the products that fueled the booming economy in the peace time that followed. America had never been more productive, but prosperity always comes a cost, and in 1948, it was the people of donora who paid the price. In october of that year, pennsylvania suffered a Freak Weather event, and in this small town, it caused the worst air pollution disaster in the nations history. The real facts behind that incident have remained hidden for decades. Devra davis, a leading environmental scientist has spent years trying to uncover the truth. This was the main drag of donora, this is where everything happened and where people would gather, there were stores and um, lot of bars, and it was pretty vibrant community and lot of activity, lot different than it is today with lot of things boarded up, three steel and zinc mills dominated the town, the mills were everything, without the mills there would have been no denor at all, because the vast majority of the people either worked in the mills or. Had jobs that were somehow related to them. It was the sustaining force for community. The towns industrial success relied its location on the manon gahela river. The river gave life to the mills. In order to make steel you need lots of water, and you have that here. Denoras location made it prosperous, but its steep. Terrain also made it vulnerable to a weather phenomenon severe fog, which in 1948 would reak havoc on this community. Valley fogs are clouds that form at ground level. A clear night, the ground radiates heat upwards, so the air at ground level gets colder and colder. In a valley, this cold air collap the bottom, when moist. From the river rises and meets the cold layer, the moisture condenses around tiny particles in the air and form water droplets. In large quantities this becomes fog. In denora, fogs were frequent because there were lots of particles for the water to condense around, and when fog mixes with pollution, it becomes smog. Fog and smog are pretty strange. Spooky phenomena, but actually theyre little more than tiny suspended droplets of water hanging in the air. Now in a lab like this, its actually very difficult to generate a proper fog, so the only way we can make fog is by using fog machine, but in 1940s in a city like denora, a combination of fog and the accrid smoke from the local factories would have combined. Together into a really nasty smog, on october 27th, 1948 the town woke up to a thick and accurd smog, classic donora weather. I dont think anybody ever thought it was anything unusual, truthfully. They at first thought it was just an ordinary heavy smog, they couldnt see their feet at the ground, but that wasnt all that unusual. By the end of that first day though, this was something different, it didnt dissipate, it didnt go, the next morning, the town is still shroud in smog, its not usually so persistent, and soon its effects are felt all over town. The street lights were on, they didnt go off automatically, it was very difficult to see the traffic signal, so the cars were going very slowly through the community. Some people couldnt even find their ways home, they needed to find others to help them get around. Normally, wind or rain would disperse the smog, but not this time. As the week progresses, it continues to build, becoming more and more pervasive. In denora, the smog got so thick that people reported not being able to see even a foot in front of them. These are really surreal and highly disorientating conditions, under which your sight is useless and all you can rely on is your sense of of hearing, but that wasnt the worst of it. This smog corrosive and with. Every breath people would have been inhaling this corrosive mist to some of the most delicate tissues in their voice. Before long, its starting to take its toll on peoples health. For local pharmacist rosemary iams, it was busy time. There was probably three times as many people come in that you would normally see. Take this breathing problems. Through the town, there seem to be something sinister in this latest relentless smog, four days into the extreme weather on friday october 29th, 1948, with many donoran still oblivious to the surge of illness. Halloween parade, one of the towns annual highlights, goes ahead as planned. Most of the time turned out for the halloween parade. The only thing was that i couldnt see the people across. Avenue, thats not a very wide avenue because the small was so dense. As children parade through the streets, people in houses just few feet away are reaching a critical condition. Most people, like my mother, carried on, went to the halloween parade, behind the scenes a lot of people were getting worried, some whove never been sick were developing really bad coughs and those who are already ill, some of them were starting to die, toxic. Smog is starting to take the ultimate toll on the people of donora. Why its become so severe is still a mystery to them. Theyre yet to discover the force responsible is the weather. In 1948, a gagging smog has smothered the town of donora pennsylvania for four days, infiltrating the lives and loss of its inhabitants. It seems to be held in place by some invisible force. That force weather. In october 1948, donora and eastern pennsylvania were covered by vast High Pressure system. In other parts of the us, regular weather patterns prevail, but right over dunora, the High Pressure brings calm, stable weather. Theres no wind or rain to disperse the cold, small laded in air. The extreme weather here is really almost the complete absence of weather. In the sense that almost nothing was happening, there were just the same air sitting there stable and building up pollutants. The High Pressure system triggers a hazardous meteorol effect. Air heated by the earth at ground level rises and begins to warm the colder air above it. If the High Pressure system persists, a switch eventually occurs and the highlight air becomes than the air below it. This is a temperature inversion. In donora, the warm air acts as cap over the valley, trapping fumes inside. Special effects expert david woods replicates the capping effect of a temperature inversion using models and smoke machine. This is a representation of donora, town in a steepsideded. Valley, as you can see, most of the pollution is actually leaving the valley as it should, and uh, this perspects lid represent the warmair cap. That form over the valley trapping in for pollution. As days go by, the toxic fumes have nowhere to go. The smog builds, getting thicker and swamping the town. Five days in and the situation takes an alarming turn. Young telephone operator, aliraniac struggles through the to reach work. We had to buzz in to get in the door and the girl let me in, and she said, hurry up, get up here. This is um get your set on people are dying, the doctors telephone starts to ring off the hook, after a while we realized here something was drastically wrong here, the Emergency Services are inundated with calls and the hospitals fill up with patients, the deaths of people experience would been like suffocating, like trying to breathe through a straw, no matter how. Deeply you inhale, the lungs are not getting air. By the end of the fifth day, the death toll is reached 18. Several hundred are string with illness. Local physician d william rongus knows the factories are to blame and he issues an urgent warning to the people of donora. He told people literally get the hell out of town. He said that, if you can leave, get out of here. The mill owners deny that theyre responsible, but they eventually to slow down production in the plants. But in the end, its not their actions that saved people of danora. On sunday, october 3st, its the weather that finally brings relief. A front came through and it rained, the wind picked up, and with the wind and the rain, normal cycle of weather could happen again. The smog has lifted and the aftermath town takes stock. 20 have died, 6,000 more made sick. Within days, workers had returned to the mills, but. One question remained exactly was it that it killed so many . Its a question that some didnt want answered. For decades, the cause of the 20 deaths in denora pennsylvania in 1948 remained unsolved, but after years of investigating the case, devra davis believes shes found the answer. That massive inversion hit the entire mon. Valley, which was full of mills. Those deaths, as far as we know, only happened in donora. What was unique about donora. The whole mon valley was full of steelmills and coke up, but only dora had the zinc plant, huge zinc plant of which it was very proud. Make zinc, you need calcium fluoride, you combine it with sand. That combination releases highly reactive fluoride gas, like the gases that killed people in the first world. Or can through the upper respiratory tract and then cause separating bloody mass of the lower lungs and thats what happened in donora in several of the autopsies that i reviewed. In the aftermath of the tragedy an investigation is mounted, but the authorities are unwilling to pin blame on the mills, concerned by the economic damage it might cause. They conclude instead that the deaths were caused by an act of god. As a result, lessons about pollution that could have been learned around the world are ignored. This has catastrophic impact four years later in 1952, when a similar weather event thousands of miles away strikes at the heart of london england. British meteorologist thomas shaffernacker has studied the event. Well, this is one of the best views of london you can possibly get and we can see the house of parliament here big bang. And behind it the batterers station, which is huge icon of londons industrial. The perfect conditions for cs landmarks today, just over a century ago, it was a completely different story. Back then, londons factories and homes filled the air with suty smoke. When suit combined with fog coming off londons river tems, thick smog formed. One londoner who remembers the smog well is done. We recover from the war, tu was builting out the fumes, it was a place to live. Then on december 5th, 1952, a large High Pressure weather system sets over london, the city is enveloped in cold, dry, stable air, just like over donora pennsylvania in 1948. Its almost like a lid stuck over london, so all of those. Coming out of the chimnes and the factories got stuck creating this thick slushy slurry smog, you couldnt see where youre going, behind us is. His way up in the sky, but you you couldnt see the base of the column in his days, it was a frining experience, Poor Visibility isnt the only problem, sulpur dioxide from coalburning fires reacts with water in the foggy air to form sulpuric acid. 800 tons of the gas are spewed into londons air during the week of the great smog, this small is horrible, the taste of sulfurth, the. Deposit on your skin and thought they were going to die, sulfur acid is one of the most reactive and corrosive materials we know of, and in highly concentrated form, you can actually use it to destroy organic materials like this sponge. Now the sulpuric acid present in the small be much, much more dilute, so perhaps the if would be less dramatic, you would still. Severe irritation and of course longterm respiratory problems. As the high press system over london enters its fifth consecutive day, smog claims first victim, death toll rapidly escalated. By the end of the week, its reached 4,000. A further 12,000 people die over the following year. The scale of this weather disaster is are too big to ignore. This time, killer smog would change. Our approach to the environment for good. In december, 1952, london was crippled by extreme smog. It was a disaster for london, schools were closed, transport was halted, uh, airports werent working at all. In fact, london ground to a complete halt, so london was in the midst of a manmade natural disaster. In just one week. 4,000 people died. The incident echoed what happened in denura pennsylvania just few years earlier when 20 people lost their lives. Londons disaster directed fresh attention on that tragedy of 1948. From the horror, a glimmer of hope emerged. Well, i truly believe that because there were many radio stations and newspapers wanted something to publish. That this became wellknown throughout the united states. Soon, people elsewhere started wondering what smog mean for their communities. If lot of pollution in a small period of time could kill healthy working class people, then the question had to be asked, what does lot of pollution over a long period of time do to all of us, because you had people dying, the double tragedies of donora and london force governments into action. In 1955, the American Congress passed the air pollution control act. In britain, the cleaner act followed year later. The laws gave rise to a whole new field of Scientific Research into air pollution. Today, legacy continues through the work of people like environmental specialist neil darhu. Yeah, that is the map working well there behind you. Yeah, okay. He travels around the pittsburgh area in a mobile air laboratory. He and his team aim to create comprehensive maps showing areas where air pollution is strongest. We hope to do once complete these maps pollution to be able to go to policy makers uh to then see if we can do anything about the sources of that pollut. Although air pollution remains a problem, the levels he records today are over 80 times lower than they were in 1948. Something good has come out of. But it was a cer certainly was a tragedy, but the end result has been very good. Laid the foundation for understanding that we had to do something about air pollution, that that smoke was not just the price of progress. My grandfather used to say that it sound like money, well that smell of money could turn out to be deadly. The weather that brought disaster to two industrial communities last century was ultimately responsible for creating a cleaner future for us all. Ian puddick found himself controversially charged with harassment by city of London Police. This relatively minor charge resulted in raids on his home, office and accountants. You think about the allegations against dean, there was overkill in the Police Approach to this, in the raides in his home, the raids in his business. It didnt seem necessary. Police interviews went unrecorded. Accusations were made against ian without any justification. If what he was saying was true. What is on is left to huge to class a drugs. Be sold, is that sort of thing that that a policeman really do . And worst of all, there is evidence that city of London Police were influenced by outside voices, we live in england, things are transparent, things are wighter than white, well theyre not, this is case of standing up and not allowing themselves to be bullied by by these thugs. Its always difficult to talk about oneself an objective manner, but uh, ive had career which started in turkey, i had all of my secondary education and my University Education in turkey and then i went to the us to get a phd, so i was assistant professor at university of michigan in ann harbor, which was Interesting University and today is, those days the head. The Computer Science department where i was hired to work as assistant professor was one of the actual signatories, actually the inventors of what is known a machine, the fonman machine is the initial model of computation which has been implemented in todays computers, so the fun machine is the best basic template, the basic model, conceptual model for all the computers that we use, it was very interesting for me to be an environment was actually the first author of the first paper describing what we Call Computers today, so that was a revealing experience. At that time, with a full bright fellowship, i was not allowed to stay totally in the us more than five years and returned to the other side of the atlantic and joined institute in france called eria those days. My drive for looking at problems has always been understand what is going on, to look a situation and try to understand it both theoretically in terms of mathematics, but also to see how it can be done better through practical approaches, so this has been always my curiosity, why is it like that . How can we explain it . How can make it better and how can it actually happen practice . Most of my real successes, they have been driven by a strong sense of failure, but this particular aspect that im curious about, i know im failing, and by failing repeatedly at the end, find the way out, so i think that one aspect that people have to understand is that success is the result of failure, so first of all you really have to fail, and as you fail and you are self critical, you find the way out. My work includes science, essentially mathematics science, includes very often direct applications in technology, so i think i got the award because of this dual characteristic of science and technology in the information sciences, in computers, in the field of Computer Science, communication science and areas which involve information technology. The way the prize is set up is is wonderful. I think it it currently focuses on areas which have a strong technological content, which is probably. Correct in terms of priorities, i think that the prize, as it is now, with the double aspect of science and practicality is quite original and interesting as new contribution to the way to look at things, dont think just about science, dont think just about technology and making money, look at the links between science and technology, and look at the interplain. Aleppo, a city raised to the ground, destructed by war. But beyond the rubble in a halfdestroyed house, life still continues, all of its beauty, zest and hope. Your headlines for this hour, Iran Security forces thought, assassination plans targeting. Several senior sunny clerics, judges and members of the Islamic Revolution was core. Living economic institutes warned the recession in europes largest economy, germany, this year will be worse than previously feared. And nagornokarabakhs breakaway government announces this disillusion as over half of the enclaves population moved to armenia following azerbaijans offensive

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