Oct 18, 2018 3 min read

DONORA – A Chinese professor who is visiting Washington & Jefferson College said she’s only been in the United States for three days and wonders why the air is so fresh.

Qinfang Fan also said she sees parallels between her country’s pollution problems and what it was like in the United States before the steel industry collapsed decades ago.

“There are a lot of similarities between the 1948 Donora smog and the current situation in China,” Fan said through an interpreter Thursday while visiting the Donora Smog Museum.

Fan and her daughter, Haomin Lin, are at W&J thanks to a $400,000 grant the college was awarded over four years to provide environmental programs through the lens of the Chinese culture, said Bob East, an associate professor in the college’s environmental studies program.

East said W&J was one of only five colleges in the country to receive such a grant from the Henry Luce Foundation. The New York nonprofit strives to “strengthen international understanding, and foster innovation and leadership in academic, policy, religious and art communities,” its website states.

“Because China is going through in a couple of decades what we went through over several decades, I believe it is important for them to learn about the industrial history of our region,” East said.

“They, too, have many cities struggling to make the transition away from heavy industry and a legacy of pollution,” East said.

The Chinese visitors were shown a slide presentation in Donora about steel and zinc pollution that contributed to the infamous Donora smog, which is approaching its 70th anniversary this month.

The program also included narration by David Lonich, a retired Ringgold School District teacher who explained how more than 20 people died over a Halloween weekend in October 1948.

A mixture of warm and cold air trapped smokestack emissions from steel and zinc mills in the bowl-shaped valley until rain washed away the pollution. The event has been called the nation’s worst air pollution disaster, and it launched discussions that led to the country’s first clean-air laws.

“There was a lot of bad stuff coming out of that zinc mill,” Lonich said.

“The town was dirty,” he said. “People changed clothes in the middle of the day because they became soiled.”

The mills closed in the 1950s and 1960s, stripping the borough of thousands of jobs and paychecks.

Someone in the audience later explained to the Chinese visitors that the air is cleaner today because of the collapse of the steel industry and the nation’s move away from coal-fired power plants to those fueled by natural gas.

Fan teaches at China Petroleum University in Qingdao, China. Her daughter is about to earn her doctorate from the school, East said. They are scheduled to be at W&J for a week before returning to China.