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Climate & Environment


THE SORDID TALE OF L.A.’S FOREVER WAR ON SMOG


Windows down, gas mask on. Sera Segal-Alsberg brought out the heavy duty
protection during an L.A. smog alert in June 1979.
(Boris Yaro / Los Angeles Times)
By Patt MorrisonColumnist 
Oct. 1, 2023 5 AM PT
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Aggressive and impactful reporting on climate change, the environment, health
and science.

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A handsome man with the physique of the college football player he had once been
walks into an airtight, 8-foot-square Plexiglas booth heated to 90 degrees.

The door closes behind him.

When he staggers out, two hours later, he has won no fabulous prizes. Instead,
he is a little headachey. He has trouble concentrating, his eyes are weepy, and,
as a doctor will soon tell him, he has lost — temporarily at least — 22% of his
lung capacity.

By now, you know this man is not a game-show contestant. And this is most
definitely not a game.

But it is a stunt.

The newspaper reporters and photographers were there in 1956 to watch the man in
the box, S. Smith Griswold, head of Los Angeles County’s 9-year-old Air
Pollution Control District. And he had a point to prove.


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He spent those two hours breathing in a potent summertime version of what
millions of his fellow Angelenos were breathing every day — smog — to show them
what it did to the human body, and to Los Angeles.

Smog gets in their eyes in downtown Los Angeles in 1964.
(Los Angeles Times archive / UCLA Library )
Seen from the hills near the Arroyo Seco Parkway, smog envelops Los Angeles City
Hall and the rest of the Civic Center in 1948.
(Los Angeles Times archive / UCLA Library)

L.A. was like the royal baby in a fairy tale, endowed with abundant gifts —
glittering sunlight, dramatic landscapes and lovely beaches that remain
untarnished — until the bad wizard shows up with the asterisk:

“Yes, your landscape is gorgeous, but that magnificent rim of mountains will
trap the stew of air inside your basin as surely as a lid on a cookpot. And
those glittering sunbeams will curse you by creating a doomsday photochemical
reaction with whatever you put into that photogenic bowl — smoke, car exhaust,
wafting industrial toxins — so in time you won’t even be able to see those
glorious mountains.”

California


PATT MORRISON: L.A.’S PORT COULD HAVE BEEN IN SANTA MONICA. HERE’S HOW SAN PEDRO
WON OUT

When you think about it, it doesn’t make much sense for 1890s L.A. to put its
port all the way in San Pedro. This is the story of how that came to be — and
not the competing alternative, Santa Monica.

The first thoroughly documented smog attack in Los Angeles was July 26, 1943.
People gasped and wept and reeled. The air stank and tasted of bleach. You
couldn’t see to the end of your street.

Gas masks that people had bought in anticipation of an enemy invasion were put
to use — the United States was, after all, a combatant in World War II. But the
bad air wasn’t the result of an enemy chemical attack. A day later the most
obvious source of the muck turned out to be a nasty chemical byproduct from a
plant making artificial rubber for the war effort.

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An L.A. driver wears an only slightly satirical gas mask in his convertible on
Oct. 2, 1966.
(Los Angeles Herald Examiner Photo Collection / Los Angeles Public Library)

The plant was briefly closed down, but the smog kept coming. It was turning into
one of those murder mysteries where the identity of the killers seems so obvious
at first, and so wrong in the end.

In the 80 years since, we have rehabilitated some of those killers, and locked
some of them up. Others, we have put quietly to death. But some are still out
there, still committing mayhem on our landscapes and our lives.



Four hundred and one years earlier, the first “smog report” was entered into the
log of the San Salvador, a galleon captained by the Iberian Juan Rodriguez
Cabrillo. He and his crew were the first Europeans to lay eyes on California,
and what they saw on Oct. 8, 1542, off the coast of what is now Los Angeles, was
... proto-smog.

Column One

A showcase for compelling storytelling from the Los Angeles Times.

More stories

The same lid-on-a-pot geography of World War II was in place in the 16th
century, when, from offshore, Cabrillo’s pilot spotted the chocolatey layer of
smoke inland, either from a natural seasonal brush fire, or from fires started
by Native Americans to drive game. In the ship’s log, the place was named “Bahia
de los Fumos.” Bay of Smokes. The next day, the departing ship’s log elaborated:
“Bay of Fires.”

Angelenos in the centuries thereafter came to know something about this very
occasional quirk of air and topography and seasons. But it wasn’t until the war
brought the defense industry, and the defense industry brought people by the
many thousands, and the people bought and brought their cars, that — like
tumblers falling into place on a lock — all the ingredients for smog fell
dangerously into place.

Putting up with smog for the duration of the war was one thing, with all the
defense plants going full blast. But V-E Day and V-J Day came and went — and the
smog didn’t.

California


PATT MORRISON: WILL L.A. EVER PRODUCE MORE GIMMICKY, LOVABLE PITCHMEN LIKE CAL
WORTHINGTON?

Cal Worthington (and his ‘dog’ Spot), ‘Madman’ Muntz and other colorful local
pitchmen used to claim space in the public consciousness. Our culture may no
longer be built for that brand of commercial antics.

Aug. 30, 2023

In 1947, L.A. County created the Air Pollution Control District, granddaddy to
today’s South Coast Air Quality Management District, to hunt down the guilty
parties. It was empowered to switch on the wartime air raid sirens to signal
Angelenos when the air became too horrible to remain outside.

All of the big industries, the defense businesses that stayed in business, the
new peacetime factories, and the construction and manufacturing interests —
almost all of them were required to get permits. But this was a porous
arrangement. In 1970, companies filed 337 petitions for waivers from complying
with pollution rules. Only 19 were denied.

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And the smog persisted.

“Smog Cuts Field of Air Beauties” reads The Times headline from February 1947,
when a Glendale pageant was disrupted by poor air quality.
(Los Angeles Times archive)

A beauty contest to select Miss Grand Central Air Terminal 1947 in Glendale
wound up with only 10 contestants. The other 20, flying in from across Southern
California, couldn’t get there because their planes couldn’t land in the smog. A
year later, during a court hearing about the pollution generated from a dump in
Whittier, the judge was startled to see that “the smog comes right into the
courtroom and envelops the witness box.”

Los Angeles — the place where people with tuberculosis and emphysema had come by
the thousands for a remedy (or a stay of their death sentence), the place that
boasted that its very air could cure people — was now creating its own lung
cases.



The smog alarm didn’t begin in earnest with people.

It began with plants.

In the 40 years before 1950, Los Angeles was consistently the single most
productive agricultural county in the nation. Quantity, quality, variety — green
on the ground and green on the trees meant green in the pockets.

The Los Angeles Department of Water and Power used an experimental electric
truck in 1967. You can see why, with City Hall shrouded in smog in the
background.
(Los Angeles Times archive / UCLA Library)
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But the demand for houses for all those new postwar Californians was not the
only factor that was costing L.A. County its agricultural riches. Smog got there
first.

By the war’s end, it was noticeable. Beets, spinach, and endive died where they
grew, with telltale dried-up, silver-metallic leaves. In 1949, “smog gas” killed
a field of romaine lettuce in 36 hours. Growers around present-day Compton and
in the San Gabriel Valley took a chemical company to court for killing their
crops. An Inglewood orchid grower — L.A. was once a flower powerhouse — said
smog had wiped out most of his blooms in 1958; out of 3,000 plants, he could
save only two dozen.

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And so the conflict was set: newer industrial businesses versus the older
agricultural business and human health.

The institutional response was that burdening businesses with smog regulations
would be too costly.

At one of many smog summits — this one convened by a county supervisor in 1949 —
a weather forecaster named Irving P. Krick came down squarely, and rather
fatalistically, on the side of industry. For 40 or 50 days each year,
temperatures reached smog-critical levels, but even shutting down refineries
during the worst smog days would be “a totally useless cost.” Angelenos, Krick
argued, “can’t have their cake and eat it too ... smog will be a continuing
problem and we may as well learn to live with it until we can know all sources
that produce it. There are still more benefits derived from living in Southern
California with smog than in living elsewhere without it.”

It took the medical experts a while to get up to speed, to organize any
methodical surveys of what smog does to a human body. And anyway, how could you
separate out smog damage, from, say, the effects of smoking, when almost half of
all American adults were nicotine freaks? “Research on the problem is extremely
complex,” is all the state’s public health director could offer an Assembly
committee in 1950.

People in neighborhoods near L.A.’s port complex breathe some of the dirtiest
air in the region.
(Genaro Molina / Los Angeles Times)
After decades of technological improvements, Southern California’s air has
gotten cleaner — but heavy traffic and other pollutants mean it isn’t completely
clean.
(Genaro Molina/Los Angeles Times)
Advertisement


Ed Avol, an L.A. native whose school days were marked with all the times that
kids were kept indoors during recess because of smog alerts, became a professor
of clinical preventive medicine at USC’s Keck medical school and an expert in
environmental health. He’s been at it for more than 30 years.

Today, “we know a tremendous amount about the effects of air pollution, both
short-term and long-term effects on people,” Avol told me in 2019.

“Certainly the lung is the primary organ for which there are effects, and we
know a lot about it. But it goes far beyond the lungs, because once it crosses
the air-blood barrier in the lungs, it gets into the blood in the circulatory
system and then essentially the contaminants could go anywhere in your body.

“So it’s not surprising that we see effects in the lungs, in the heart, in the
metabolic system, in the brain. ... It’s actually been connected with some
neurological problems in terms of younger children being able to pay attention
and learn in school. ... Later on in life it turns out that air pollution has a
role to play in terms of thinking about Alzheimer’s and dementia and the rate of
neurological decline.”



For the first Earth Day, in April 1970, the comic-strip artist Walt Kelly came
up with a poster with the legend, “We have met the enemy, and he is us.”

No ordinary car-obsessed Angelenos wanted to hear that. Big industries had to be
responsible for smog, right? We’re the victims here! The oil wells and
refineries, the smokestack companies, the metal and chemical shops, the aviation
and defense plants — what else could be at fault?

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A postcard from Patt Morrison’s collection shows a long-ago view of downtown Los
Angeles, with the mountains beyond that lend drama to our landscapes and trap
dirty air like a lid on a pot.

The bearer of the bad news was the Caltech chemist Ari Haagen-Smit. He began his
smog research in 1948 — a year of wretched smog attacks, and the year his wife
shared hostess duties when L.A.’s first smog czar addressed Caltech’s faculty
women’s club. (Maybe she shared what she heard with her husband and that started
him down his research path.)

Four years later, he was ready with his results. The “birth of smog” has been
discovered, The Times crowed — an “astounding phenomenon.” When car exhaust and
refinery hydrocarbons, which we had aplenty, are bombarded by sunbeams — voila!
— we get ozone, a principal ingredient in smog. The Times described
Haagen-Smit’s announcement melodramatically. “Going on in the air, under the
effect of sunlight, are billions of miniature ‘atom bomb’ explosions, a chain
reaction of violence and chemical fury.”

California


PATT MORRISON: WHAT IF LAX WERE LITERALLY ANYWHERE ELSE? IT COULD HAVE BEEN

We still have lots of airfields, but gone from the landscape are the runways —
near Griffith Park, near Wilshire and Western, in the Palisades — that could
have challenged LAX for air superiority.

June 13, 2023

Another chain reaction of fury? Angelenos, when they were told that their
cherished cars — and their drivers — were the problem.

Griswold of the Air Pollution Control District suggested carpooling and floated
the idea of reviving wartime-style gas rationing. Imagine how popular that was
to the hot-rodders and cruisers and suburban commuters who gloried in being two-
or three-car households.

Griswold was less inclined to blame cars and drivers than car manufacturers, who
had the technology, he said, to control tailpipe crud, and there were patent
records from 1909 to prove it.

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A smoggy L.A. day in 2016.
(Francine Orr / Los Angeles Times)

They were just playing the odds, Griswold contended. While L.A.’s smog cost us
$11 billion a year, automakers had spent “less than one year’s salary of 22 of
their executives” to clean up a problem much of their making, he was quoted as
saying in his New York Times obituary. And as some stationary sources like
factories got cleaner, those gains were soon overtaken and overwhelmed by more
and yet more cars on Southern California asphalt.

Angelenos were also in the habit of burning up their household garbage in
backyard incinerators. So handy. So filthy.

In 1957, L.A. County banned the incinerators outright, in favor of curbside
trash collection. But some Angelenos took their picket signs and their dudgeon
to City Hall. Curbside collection? Expensive! Burdensome! Practically
un-American!

Into the 1960s, L.A. mayor Sam Yorty courted votes from a “housewives revolt”
over the oh-so-taxing chore of separating glass, metal and paper rubbish.



When we weren’t cursing the brown darkness, we did sometimes manage to make
light of it. Late-night host Johnny Carson made our smog famous — a national
punchline. I found that there was smog memorabilia to be collected, and so I
did, like a smog crying towel, and “genuine” canned L.A. smog — “Breathe the air
the movie stars breathe!” was the promise on one Technicolor label.

Advertisement


A 1950s souvenir smog can, from Patt Morrison’s collection, promises that it
contains “the smog used by famous Hollywood stars!” with “no pollutants or
irritants removed!” (Ricardo DeAratanha / Los Angeles Times)

A Los Angeles physician named Elmer Belt, a member of the state Board of Health,
said a patient of his, a man with one glass eye, had a bloodshot version made
when he came to L.A.

Way back in 1944, a body called the County Fumes and Smoke Commission more or
less knew the answers. It just couldn’t show its work; Haagen-Smit would do that
years later. Here is how it so presciently described L.A., one year after the
notorious 1943 wartime smog attack.

“A community of more than 2,000,000 people is shut up in a vast room with doors
and windows closed and into this room is poured the smoke and fumes from a
thousand stacks, from tens of thousands of home incinerators, from hundreds of
thousands of autos and trucks, poisonous vapors from chemical plants, stenches
from packinghouses, sewers, and glue factories, lachrymating gases from
refineries and burning rubbish heaps — a hellish cloud that fills the room and
is indifferent to municipal boundaries.” (I love “lachrymating” — such a
high-flown word for something that triggers weeping.)

That was almost 80 years ago. The diagnosis was right. Since then Los Angeles,
and California, joined by much of the rest of the urbanized world, are engaged
in the same battles.

Explaining L.A. With Patt Morrison

Los Angeles is a complex place. In this weekly feature, Patt Morrison is
explaining how it works, its history and its culture.

Read more from Patt Morrison

There is no smog cure — the ancient geography sees to that — but there are
treatments. Like the water-savings devices that make it possible for more
Angelenos to use less water, many passive and more or less painless new
technologies, like electric and hybrid cars, fueled by kilowatts or by cleaner
(and more expensive) special formula gasoline, have made the air noticeably
better.

Yet 98 out of 100 Californians still breathe unhealthful air.

And smog is a borderless phenomenon. Chip Jacobs, who co-authored the seminal
book “Smogtown: The Lung-Burning History of Pollution in Los Angeles,” says with
a sad shake of his head that a regular Pacific Drift of pollution from China
accounts for a good share of air pollution for the Sacramento Valley and Bay
Area. “So even as our cars have gotten cleaner, our gasoline is purer, and we’ve
taken all these technological steps, this Frankenstein that we helped create
known as the People’s Republic of China’s economy is biting us.”

Cleaner air, but not clean. Don’t be fooled — the noxious stuff that goes by the
name of tropospheric ozone is the smog we can’t see. Still, on most days now, we
can awaken to the sight of mountains. Schoolkids can play outdoors at recess.
And if your eyes water, it’s likely at the sad state of the world, not the
stinging state of the air.

And, again, like in the fairy stories, after all the ugly, choking poisons we
are cursed with, our garage-sale jumble of icky particles — from coal,
chemicals, cars and their noxious human-made brethren — still does leave behind
one speck of a blessing: killer sunsets.

That smoggy glow, as seen in Long Beach recently.
(Luis Sinco / Los Angeles Times)
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Patt Morrison

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Patt Morrison is a writer and columnist for the Los Angeles Times, where as a
member of two reporting teams, she has a share of two Pulitzer Prizes. Her
public broadcast programs have earned her six Emmys, her two non-fiction books
were bestsellers and Pink’s, the Hollywood hot dog stand, named its veggie dog
after her.


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