The History of Smog in Los Angeles: Causes, Effects, and Solutions

[00:00:00]- It makes your eyes water your nose run.

[00:00:03]- Why are you running?

[00:00:04]- It irritates your throat, (screaming) it makes you wheeze.

[00:00:10](wheezing) ♪ Smoke weed every day. ♪ - No not that, it's smog.

[00:00:16]Los Angeles residents know all about the ugly brown haze that's tarnished Tinseltown in the past.

[00:00:22]How did the city break the grip of this nasty scourge and pull itself back from the smoggy abyss?

[00:00:27]Grab your inhaler, adjust your gas mask and stockpile some Visine 'cause this is the Story of Smog.

[00:00:34](upbeat music) All cities have some degree of air pollution.

[00:00:37]But places like Denver, Mexico City and Los Angeles have it tougher because of their similar layout.

[00:00:44]LA is situated on a low-lying coastal plain, surrounded by high mountains.

[00:00:48]It's like a giant fish bowl.

[00:00:50]Because of these geographical features, Los Angeles is at the mercy of a phenomenon called temperature inversion.

[00:00:56]But what's a Temperature Inversion?

[00:00:58]- During the day, the radiation from the sun heats up the ground and that hot air rises, cools off, comes back down and heats up from the ground again.

[00:01:07]It's convection, creates a flow of air.

[00:01:09]Once the sun goes down, it stops heating the ground and the ground stops heating the air above it.

[00:01:14]So the hot air left over from the day just takes off as coll air swoops in.

[00:01:19]But in a place surrounded by mountains, that hot air gets trapped, a temperature inversion occurs where air closer to the ground cools and gets trapped.

[00:01:27]It's got nowhere to go, the warm air just sitting above it keeps pollutants from escaping into the stratosphere.

[00:01:34]Got it? Great!

[00:01:37]- This anomaly took a frightening turn on July 26, 1943 when a dense brown fog appeared suddenly and dramatically over the city.

[00:01:46]This mysterious cloud immediately made people's eyes sting, their nose run, and their throats burn.

[00:01:51]Visibility was cut to just three city blocks and blinded motorists had to swerve their way through the thick, soupy mess.

[00:01:58]For years Angelenos had coped with an irritating haze and now it seemed as though it had reappeared in a much stronger and forceful form.

[00:02:06]Everyone panicked, it's gotta be a chemical attack by the Japanese.

[00:02:10]The surprise air attack on Pearl Harbor was just two years earlier, what else could it be?

[00:02:14]Little did they know, this was LA's first encounter with smog.

[00:02:19]LA officials blamed a local gas plant that was manufacturing synthetic rubber ingredients and public pressure shut the plant down, but the smog continued.

[00:02:27]And it got worse.

[00:02:29]Everyone from polished businessmen to sweaty cab drivers hacked by the tens of thousands, as the menacing fog deprived them of fresh air.

[00:02:37]The mayor of LA foolishly vowed to eliminate the mysterious haze in four months but it would actually take several years to identify the problem.

[00:02:45]In October that same year, a Smoke and Fumes Commission was set up and believing this air pollutant was a mixture of smoke and coastal fog, the term smog became popular.

[00:02:55]Some even referred to it as "the beast".

[00:02:58]The war came to a close, but the problem continued.

[00:03:01]LA Angels fans struggled to see players on the field during a game.

[00:03:04]With pleas from red-eyed, raspy-voiced citizens, Governor Earl Warren, signed a law in 1947 setting up the Los Angeles County Air Pollution Control District.

[00:03:14]The first of its kind, this organization was tasked with regulating the oil refineries, power plants and steel mills, the industries everyone thought was the obvious culprits.

[00:03:22]As the brown fog persisted, city officials rode blimps over the city, trying to spot the source of the suspicious haze.

[00:03:29]What was going on in LA?

[00:03:31]Other cities were coping with their own air pollution.

[00:03:33]Pittsburgh, and other cities like it on the East Coast were mostly dealing with pollutants from burning coal but LA didn't even use much coal, if at all.

[00:03:41]It wasn't until the early 1950s that the 'gas attack' mystery of '43 was finally solved.

[00:03:47]There was a chemist working at the Cal Tech named Arie Haagen-Smit.

[00:03:51]He had been studying pineapples and fine wines for a few years, but in 1948, he chose to shift gears.

[00:03:56]Farmers in LA County complained that air pollution from refineries damaged their crops by bleaching and discoloring the leaves.

[00:04:03]This was something not seen in other parts of the country.

[00:04:06]So, Arie's starting-point was investigating the damaged plants.

[00:04:09]He knew that LA smog was not like the air pollution found back East.

[00:04:13]There it was composed mainly of sulfur compounds and soot from burning coal and heavy oils.

[00:04:19]He also noticed that despite early smoke control measures, citizens still suffered from eye irritation on smoggy days and continued to smell a bleach-like odor in the air.

[00:04:29]Arie enlisted the help of Peg Brunelle, a chief chemist for the LA County Air Pollution Control District.

[00:04:36]Having experienced the effects of smog first-hand, Peg was ready to solve this mystery.

[00:04:39]The pair sealed plants in airtight containers to hunt for the oxidizing elements in smog that was causing so much damage.

[00:04:46]They put in the legwork, driving to local Southland refineries and gathering air samples in five-liter flasks.

[00:04:52]Arie reconfigured his old pineapple-testing device and blew a few hundred cubic feet of polluted air through cooling traps and what came out was several ounces of vile-smelling, nasty brown sludge.

[00:05:04]He put it in a bottle, and called it Jagermeister, the end.

[00:05:08]I'm kidding, it was smog.

[00:05:09]Ozone, sulfur dioxide, carbon monoxide and nitrogen were all revealed in the liquified smog.

[00:05:16]This explained the bleachy odor that people smelled.

[00:05:18]Wait, I thought Ozone was way up high?

[00:05:22]- Well, who's this guy?

[00:05:24]Okay ready.

[00:05:25]Well there's good ozone and bad ozone.

[00:05:27]Good ozone is the stratosphere extending upward about 6 miles to 30 miles.

[00:05:31]It's the layer that's natural, untainted and protects life on Earth by filtering harmful sun rays.

[00:05:37]We don't have to breath it, it's all good.

[00:05:39]Bad ozone, or ground-level ozone, is harmful, it doesn't belong down here, it reacts with the aldehydes and ketones and has other harmful agents like sulfur dioxide, carbon monoxide, and nitrogen.

[00:05:51]- The ozone found in the experiment at Arie's lab posed a real head-scratcher, since no local industries released ozone.

[00:05:59]Where was the smog forming?

[00:06:01]Where did it come from?

[00:06:03]Arie knew nitric oxides from car exhaust was released into the air, and the incomplete burning of gasoline also released gaseous hydrocarbons, as did oil refineries.

[00:06:12]By themselves neither nitrous oxide nor hydrocarbons could explain the smog.

[00:06:16]There had to be an additional piece to the puzzle.

[00:06:20]What did LA have more of than other city?

[00:06:23]Sunlight.

[00:06:24]♪ The sun is shining bright. ♪ - To confirm his hunch, Arie's team set up a Plexiglass smog chamber and pumped in nitrous oxide and hydrocarbons.

[00:06:32]Then they let the mix bake in the sun and (whooshing) smog.

[00:06:37]This was a whole new ball game.

[00:06:39]Unlike classic pollutants that got released directly into the air, this new smog formed only when man-made chemicals interacted with natural sunlight.

[00:06:47]It was photo-chemical smog.

[00:06:50]So, the bottom line was that LA's newly uncovered beast didn't come from half-assed actions at a factory or a flub at some oil plant, like originally believed in '43.

[00:07:00]It was cars.

[00:07:01]By this time Los Angeles County had two million cars on its road and all the traffic streaming into LA was making an already bad situation apocalyptic.

[00:07:09]Now that people were armed with the information, Los Angeles set out to conquer the problem, right?

[00:07:16]Mmmm, mmm, mmm, mmm, not really.

[00:07:22]The link to vehicles caused a huge uproar in car-crazed Los Angeles.

[00:07:26]- I'm in a serious relationship with my car.

[00:07:28](banjo music) - Automobile owners blamed the car manufacturers for making a defective product, and industry advocates accused Arie of biased and incompetent science.

[00:07:38]So, he started giving lectures where he whipped up smog on demand, leaving audiences choking, literally.

[00:07:44](cheering) Smog.

[00:07:46](cheering) Smog.

[00:07:48](cheering) Smog.

[00:07:50](cheering) Smog.

[00:07:52]Many on the front lines even sacrificed their health to expose the dangers of this beast.

[00:07:54]Air Pollution Control Officer S. Smith Griswold volunteered to breathe extreme levels of the pollutant in Arie's smog chamber and developed bronchitis.

[00:08:03]Other LA County Air Pollution Control District employees exposed their eyes to smog from the chamber while colleagues manned stopwatches and timed how long it took for the volunteers to experience irritation, or even tears.

[00:08:15]But civic leaders and the business community still pushed back, they were all "ozone only comes from the stratosphere.

[00:08:21]"It must drop to ocean levels and get blown "in by coastal breezes."

[00:08:26]It wasn't until 1954 that Arie got to say "I told you so."

[00:08:29]- You know what, I told ya so.

[00:08:31]I (bleeping) told ya so.

[00:08:33]- To prove the ozone from the ocean theory, the oil industry funded a Stanford Research Institute study.

[00:08:39]If the ozone was blowing in, then Catalina Island, just 29 miles off the coast would be getting a bunch of ozone but it wasn't- this blew the whole migrating ozone theory right out of the water.

[00:08:52]Get it?

[00:08:53]It's the ocean.

[00:08:54]Still, much of the public sincerely believed that automakers couldn't possibly be the bad guy in this scenario because the clear car exhaust didn't match the brown cloud they were seeing in the sky and those people who did believe it had some crazy ideas for getting rid of it.

[00:09:08]Some suggested to drill tunnels or cut passages through the mountains then build giant fans to blow the smog into the desert.

[00:09:15]Other people were just like, no let's stuff rice in car tailpipes to absorb the hydrocarbons.

[00:09:19]So, the smog situation in 1950s lingered and city officials dragged their feet until a catastrophic incident on the other side of the World.

[00:09:28]During a London cold snap on December 5th, 1952, sulfur particles mixed with fumes from burning coal.

[00:09:35]It produced a yellow fog that smelled like rotten eggs.

[00:09:38]The skies darkened and daytime visibility became so limited that if you looked down, you couldn't see your feet.

[00:09:45]That is true.

[00:09:46]Over the next four days, an estimated 12,000 Londoners would die from the pollution.

[00:09:51]By the time cold winds blew out the London smog, an additional 150,000 people had been hospitalized and thousand of animals also fell victim to the deadly fog.

[00:10:01]And the craziest part is that during this whole mess, no one noticed the rising death toll because the bodies that began to line the streets couldn't be seen through the dark haze.

[00:10:10]One year later, California's new lieutenant governor Goodwin J. Knight cited the London tragedy and made combating smog his mission.

[00:10:18]Knight started looking for someone to help improve air quality and reduce pollution.

[00:10:22]Arnold Beckman was a celebrated chemist, is that a thing?

[00:10:25]- Yeah Nolan, it's a thing.

[00:10:28]This guy invented the DU spectrophotometer, you know, the UV/VIS spectrophotometer it's like Model-T of scientific instrumentation.

[00:10:35]♪ Can I say hell yeah ♪ ♪ Hell yeah, hell yeah ♪ - You're goddamn right.

[00:10:42]- Beckman was tasked with making recommendations about pollution reform.

[00:10:46]His prescription for the cure, establish car exhaust standards, create a mass transit system, impose more regulations on refineries and fueling operations, end backyard trash burning, and ensure slower growth for heavy-polluting industries.

[00:10:59]His guidelines were published in 1953, but progress was slow.

[00:11:03]LA's population meant any full-on attempt to curb smog couldn't keep up with the pace of LA's lightning-quick growth.

[00:11:10]Car manufacturers' reaction to the crisis was sluggish at best and only when prompted by the government did they do anything.

[00:11:18]With the threat of mandatory federal regulations, the auto industry begin installing a crankcase ventilation system on their cars.

[00:11:24]This blow-by device returned unburned gases to the combustion chambers.

[00:11:29]It was a significant advance because crankcase blowby made up about 25 percent of the engine's hydrocarbon emissions.

[00:11:36]The equipment became mandatory on all cars sold in California, beginning with the 1963 models.

[00:11:42]By the mid 70s, Los Angeles experienced dangerous levels of smog more than 200 days out of the year.

[00:11:48]The city's residents were breathing some of the dirtiest air in the world.

[00:11:52]Some people built underground, backyard smog shelters.

[00:11:55]One guy started a successful business selling balloons filled with fresh, clean, desert air to Angelenos for 50 cents.

[00:12:02]There was even a Smog board game for kids.

[00:12:05]If you were a tourist, forget about buying a picture of the Hollywood sign, instead you could settle for a canister of Genuine Los Angeles Smog - a gag gift that'll make you gag!

[00:12:15]That's a fun joke we wrote.

[00:12:17]Smog alerts were put in place to warn people of hazardous air conditions, with stage one being the least severe and stage three being the don't-set-foot-outside-unless-you're-suicidal phase.

[00:12:26]As more and more research linked smog to health issues, average people became advocates.

[00:12:32]A Beverly Hills mom named Afton Slade formed Stamp Out Smog.

[00:12:36]With a flair for the theatrical, she put together an event at the Ambassador Hotel in 1964 that displayed a birthday cake.

[00:12:43]The cake, which had a skull and crossbones outlined in bright frosting, was to mark 21 years of smog in Los Angeles.

[00:12:49]Hey the smog can drink now.

[00:12:51]Slade also encouraged mothers to show up at rallies with their kids wearing gas masks, an item that became really popular at many anti-pollution rallies.

[00:13:00]Other anti-smog groups popped up in LA during the late '50s and early 60s.

[00:13:04]Dedicated and vocal, these folks influenced public opinion and demanded the powers-that-be do something about what had become a crisis.

[00:13:11]Building a better environment had entered the nation's collective consciousness.

[00:13:15]On April 22, 1970 this country held its first ever Earth Day, and eight months later President Richard Nixon signed into law the Clean Air Act, which, among other things, required a 90% reductions in emissions from new automobiles by 1975.

[00:13:32]It also allowed the newly formed Environmental Protection Agency to regulate harmful chemicals.

[00:13:38]The act provided a framework for seriously addressing the problem of rising levels of pollutants.

[00:13:44]Today, tailpipe emissions on new passenger cars are almost 99% cleaner compared to the 1960s and US cities have a much-improved air quality, with air pollutants declining by 68% from 1990 to 2014.

[00:13:57]That's really good.

[00:13:59]Fuels are much cleaner.

[00:14:01]Lead's been eliminated and sulfur levels are more than 90% lower than they were before regulations were imposed.

[00:14:07]Hydrocarbons are no longer escaping into the atmosphere when you fill up your pump.

[00:14:11]This month marks the 75th anniversary of the day LA witnessed its first encounter with smog.

[00:14:17]The incident became a turning point in the fight against air pollution and by remaining committed to clean air measures, embracing electric cars, and staying vigilant, hopefully we'll never see another day like the one on July 26, 1943.

[00:14:32]We tell the lesser known stories of the car world every week, here on Wheel House so make sure you hit that subscribe button right there and maybe hit that notification bell as well.

[00:14:39]Thanks to Bart for guest-starring on this episode, you can watch his show Science Garage right here.

[00:14:44](laughing) Ow (coughing) Check out this episode of Up to Speed.

[00:14:48]Follow me on Instagram @nolanjsykes, follow Donut on Twitter, on Instagram @donutmedia.

[00:14:53]Be nice.