page_title: 1966 New York City smog
section_title: Warnings
hierarchical_section_title: 1966 New York City smog / Background / Warnings
caption_attribution_description: English: This picture of en:Norman Cousins was taken from http://history.nasa.gov/EP-125/part2.htm And was probably created by NASA at the time of the panel it was taken from (1976).
context_page_description: The 1966 New York City smog was a major air-pollution episode, during which the city's air became filled with damaging levels of several toxic pollutants. Smog covered the city and its surrounding area from November 23 to 26, coinciding with that year's Thanksgiving holiday weekend. It was the third major smog in New York City, following events of similar scale in 1953 and 1963.
  On November 23, a large mass of stagnant air over the East Coast trapped pollutants in the city's air. For three days, New York City was engulfed in dangerously high levels of carbon monoxide, sulfur dioxide, smoke, and haze. Pockets of air pollution pervaded the greater New York metropolitan area, including parts of New Jersey and Connecticut. By November 25, the smog became severe enough that regional leaders announced a "first-stage alert". During the alert, leaders of local and state governments asked residents and industry to take voluntary steps to minimize emissions. Health officials advised people with respiratory or heart conditions to remain indoors. The city shut off garbage incinerators, requiring massive hauling of garbage to landfills.
context_section_description: Dr. Helmut F. Landsberg, a climate scientist with the federal Weather Bureau, predicted in 1963 that the Northeastern and Great Lakes regions could anticipate a major smog event every three years due to the confluence of weather events and trends like growing population, industrialization, and increased emissions from cars and central heating. In early 1966, Dr. Walter Orr Roberts—director of the National Center for Atmospheric Research—warned of the imminent threat of a smog event with the potential to kill as many as 10,000 people. Roberts identified Los Angeles or New York City as the cities most vulnerable to a large-scale lethal smog in the United States, and London, Hamburg, or Santiago as other the most vulnerable internationally. Asked if "many" American cities were vulnerable to a disaster smog event, Roberts replied, "Yes. I have been worried that we would wake up some morning to an unusual meteorological situation that prevented the air from circulating and that we might find thousands of people dead as the result of the air they were forced to breathe in that smog situation."
  The mayor's office established a 10-member task force headed by Norman Cousins (known as the editor of the weekly magazine Saturday Review) to study the problem of air pollution. The task force published a 102-page report in May 1966, finding that the city had the most polluted air of any major city in the United States, with a wider range and greater total tonnage of pollutants than Los Angeles. The task force criticized the city for lax enforcement of pollution laws, even naming the city itself the biggest violator, with municipal garbage incinerators "operat[ing] in almost constant violation" of its own laws. The report warned "all the ingredients now exist for an air-pollution disaster of major proportions" and that the city "could become a gas chamber" in the wrong weather conditions.
  A July 1966 report by the New York Academy of Medicine Committee on Public Health cautioned that New York City's air-pollution problem made it susceptible to acute and lethal episodes and recommended a reduction of air pollution. Further, the report concluded that scientists had likely not identified the full range of harmful pollutants or health effects caused by air pollution.
caption: A task force headed by Norman Cousins (pictured c. 1976) warned that the pollution in New York City was excessive and "could become a gas chamber" in the wrong weather conditions.[36]
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