Donora ‘Death Smog’ Lives in Novel, 'After the Fog'

By Kathleen Shoop

The “five days of fog”—ever heard of it? Surprisingly, even if you grew up around Donora, Pennsylvania, you might not know about it. The important hours of hazy death and illness in a small town are alive and well in textbooks, journals and memories of citizens who survived it.

Donora sits about 20 miles southeast of Pittsburgh. Many in the region are familiar with Donora’s famous Stan Musial, Ken Griffey, Ken Griffey, Jr., Devra Davis, its national champion high school football team, among many other accomplished athletes, doctors, lawyers, judges, physicians, and educators. The list is enormous for a town that boasted a population of around 14,000 at its height. In many ways its place inside a horseshoe river bend, belting out tons of steel that fed the war and built the nation is like other towns in Pittsburgh that were devastated when the steel industry collapsed.

But, one portion of Donora’s history sets it apart from the other small towns of western Pennyslvania and it’s this sliver of its past that I used as the backdrop for my novel, After the Fog. The “killing smog” occurred in 1948 when an unusual weather pattern trapped the mill gasses in the valley, killing twenty people. It is said that if the rains hadn’t finally arrived that fifth day, sweeping in fresh air to displace the bad, thousands would have been dead. This event was the impetus for the Clean Air Act of 1955 and the development of the EPA.

In researching After the Fog, I was fortunate to interview many who lived in Donora during the fog including Dr. Charles Stacey. They walked me through town, telling stories, filling in the gaps left by ordinary research. It was in these moments that my main character, Rose, and her family came fully to life in my mind. The Pavlesic family would live on the tiny street called Murray. There, a wonderful couple invited me in to show me how their house was structured back when it was stuffed to the gills with extended family.

Walking up and down the hundreds of stairs that served as sidewalks along the steep streets, I got a feel of the path Rose would have taken on her frequent trips to confession. I mapped out how long it would have taken her to walk to the mill superintendent’s home normally and how long it might have taken during the blinding smog. I wondered how easy it would have been for her to quickly visit a patient who was desperate for her care?

I stuck with the factual timeline of the suffocating smog as much as possible when writing this novel. I used interviews with Donorans and my experience with family and friends to flavor the language and set the rhythms of the novel. The fictional Pavlesics are so proud of their town, yet they want their children to move onto something different, go to college and have choices beyond the mill at the bottom of the hill. It creates a tension that many people report was familiar growing up in western Pennsylvania.

The relentless fog is the backdrop and it turns the plot in many ways, but at the novel’s heart is the Pavlesic family and a proud town that is as beautiful as it was productive. Donora’s Smog Museum and its historical society speak to the town’s importance, and I hope in using it in a fictional way, I’ve sparked some interest in a time gone by in the only place the story could have been told.

About Shoop: Kathleen Shoop is an award-winning, bestselling Kindle author and Language Arts Coach with a PhD in Reading Education. Her work has appeared in The Tribune Review, four Chicken Soup for the Soul books and Pittsburgh Parent Magazine. She lives in Oakmont with her husband and two children. After the Fog, released in May 2012, is her second historical fiction novel. The Last Letter is her debut novel.

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