On This Day in History: December 5

The Great Smog of London

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The Fog was a 1980 horror film about a fog—duh—that brought with it pissed-off drowned sailor ghosts who died a century earlier who take vengeance on a coastal town because leprosy. Wikipedia can fill you in on the rest. Anyway, London’s “Great Smog” had a much higher body count than the movie. Fog + air pollution = thousands of people dead in just a few days.

--On This Day in History, Shit Went Down: December 5, 1952--

For weeks the city had been really fucking cold [laughs in Canadian]. I mean, this was London. They may be at the same parallel as me, but our winters are not the same. Anyway, it was cold for London, plus fog, plus no environmental protection agency type thing cuz 19-fuckin-50s. It turned the air to poison.

Fucking coal. We really need to stop using that shit. Goddamn dinosaur rocks are polluting as shit, and London had been using it for centuries, not just for power generation but heating homes. I visited London in 2016 and the air seemed pretty clean—I went for a run and didn’t barf up a lung—but six decades previous it was more polluted than the parking lot of a Confederate flag convention. Continues below …

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Because of the cold the coal furnaces were working overtime for several days. Then throw in an “anticyclone” and it created a stagnation of heavily polluted air containing all sorts of nasty shit like sulfur dioxide, carbon dioxide, and smoke particles hovering in the air across the city. It began on December 5, 1952, when a fog rolled in. A short time later, the color of the fog transformed to a sickly yellowish-brown color. There were certainly many survivors of World War I gas attacks living in the city who said ah fuck not this bullshit again.

The typical Londoner was all stiff upper lip suck up the nasty rotten egg smell and go to work. Except no matter how stiff said lips were, they couldn’t protect lungs from the toxic fumes. For five days the smog punished the city, and in some locations it was so thick you couldn’t see your feet on the ground. Boat, train, and air traffic halted because visibility was for shit. If you spent any time outside, you’d return home with a greasy black coating on your face looking like you’d spent the day working in a coal mine.

People didn’t realize just how bad it was until the undertakers said, “Uh, we’re running out of coffins.” Small children, the elderly, heavy smokers, and anyone with lung problems were dropping like cans of Pabst Blue Ribbon at a Wilco concert. In the aftermath, as many as 12,000 people died from lung problems related to the Great Smog. Lotta birds bit the dust too, not just from bad air but from not being able to see fuck-all and crashing beak-first into buildings.

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