Political Quotes

“Mr. President, in late October, people who lived in a place called Donora shrugged off the thick, yellow smog that had covered their small town. It was 1948. It wasn't unusual to see a smog blanket the town, thanks to the zinc plant and the steel mill that smoked endlessly into the Pennsylvania sky. It wasn't unusual to see people coughing as they went about their day. As one reporter put it, ``People are always coughing in Donora.'' What was unusual is that the smog did not clear as the day went on. It lingered, hanging around the town, wreaking havoc for the next 5 days. At first, life seemed to go on. The Halloween parade went on as planned, even though no one could really see the people marching. The high school football game went on as planned, although the quarterbacks avoided passing plays since the wide receivers couldn't see the ball. But then someone died. People couldn't breathe. As the local hospital started to fill, the town hotel set up beds for overflow patients. By the fourth day, the hotel had to set up another emergency section--this time, a temporary morgue. The town's three funeral homes were overwhelmed. On the fifth day, the stacks of a zinc plant stopped their endless streams of smoke, and the smog that would become known as the Donora death fog finally lifted but not before nearly 7,000 people fell ill and 20 died. This is one of the many stories that show us what life was like in the United States of America before the EPA was created.…”