The fog that killed 12000 people

00:00 [♪ INTRO]
00:03 London is famously foggy.
00:05 Sometimes that can mean a wistful stroll or another excuse for a cuppa tea, but when fog
00:10 mixes with the smoke and chemicals produced by industry, it becomes something new: smog.
00:15 And for a couple of centuries, London’s smog could kill.
00:19 Really bad smogs could kill a thousand people in a few days, but no one did much about it
00:24 until 1952, when a five-day smog in London killed an estimated twelve thousand people.
00:31 It was called The Great Smog of London, and it helped wake up the country and the world
00:36 to the dangers of unrestricted pollution.
00:39 Fog is just a cloud that forms down here on the ground, which by itself isn’t that bad;
00:43 you might not be able to see well when you’re driving,
00:46 or you might not be able to land your plane, but it’s nice.
00:49 But clouds can act like sponges, forming around and trapping whatever’s already in the air.
00:54 This wasn’t a problem until the 1200s, when a lot of London
00:57 switched from wood to coal for heating their homes.
01:00 Burning coal creates soot and smoke, which can irritate your lungs,
01:04 and also creates poisons like sulfur dioxide and carbon monoxide.
01:08 Sulfur dioxide, which is a sulfur atom bonded to two oxygen atoms, reacts with water to
01:12 form sulfuric acid, which can harm your internal organs, as you might imagine.
01:17 And carbon monoxide, which is one carbon and one oxygen, binds with the hemoglobin in your
01:22 blood to stop oxygen from getting around your body.
01:24 So when London started burning coal, all the smoke and chemicals mixed with the natural
01:29 fog, and it became thicker and darker as years passed.
01:32 It wasn’t a health crisis at first,
01:34 but people did complain that the smoke smelled terrible.
01:37 And this was back in the 1200s, when everything smelled terrible already.
01:41 But it was easier to keep burning coal than to switch back to wood, so for centuries,
01:45 they just accepted the occasional thick, dark, smelly cloud hanging over the city.
01:50 As you do.
01:51Things really got dangerous when the Industrial Revolution happened in the 1700s.
01:54 Because now, coal wasn’t just heating homes.
01:57 It powered huge factories throughout the city, and all that extra smoke and soot made the
02:02 air in London’s fogs much darker.
02:04 It became so common that a physician named Harold Antoine Des Voeux
02:07 invented the term “smog” to describe it.
02:10 Really smoggy days completely blacked out the center of the city, so that you couldn’t
02:14 see more than a few meters ahead of you, even in the middle of the day.
02:17 The soot also irritated people’s lungs, causing illnesses like bronchitis
02:20 to become more common.
02:21 Some people even suffocated from breathing so much smoke or the poisons in the air.
02:26 Individual smogs in 1873 and 1892 each killed over a thousand humans and livestock.
02:32 And we don’t even know how many people died early from collecting soot in their lungs
02:37 over the course of their lives.
02:38 But coal kept London flourishing, so nobody did anything to stop it.
02:42 Then came The Great Smog.
02:44 On December 5, 1952, a thick fog rolled in and mixed with London’s dirty air,
02:49 just like it did most winters.
02:51 But this time, high-pressure weather systems surrounded London
02:55 and kept the cloud from moving on.
02:56 So an especially dense, black smog stopped on London for five miserable days.
03:02 The smog was so thick that flights were grounded, most public transportation was canceled,
03:07 trains collided, and theaters and movies stopped,
03:10 because people couldn’t see what they were watching.
03:13 This is difficult to imagine, this was 1952, not that long ago.
03:16 An estimated four thousand people died in those five awful days before the smog dissipated.
03:21 A lot of them suffocated because their lungs were inflamed from breathing in so much soot.
03:26 And with sulfur dioxide from the burning coal reacting with water vapor in the smog,
03:30 Londoners also spent those five days breathing air full of sulfuric acid.
03:35 That and the smoke contributed to respiratory and other health problems,
03:39 which killed around another eight thousand people in the following months.
03:42 Ultimately, roughly one in a thousand Londoners died because of The Great Smog.
03:46 Some people argued afterward that the spike in deaths was due to a flu epidemic, but scientists
03:52 have investigated that in all sorts of ways, and it’s really unlikely that the flu could
03:56 have been anywhere near as devastating as the smog itself.
03:59 Four years later, Parliament finally passed a Clean Air Act that dictated
04:03 what kinds of fuels could be burned within the city.
04:05 It and other laws have helped rein in the smog problem in London.
04:09 But even today, London’s air pollution lowers the life expectancy of a lot of people,
04:14 and is indirectly linked to tens of thousands of early deaths
04:17 every year throughout the United Kingdom.
04:19 Despite the Great Smog’s devastation, it took a while
04:22 for other industrial powerhouses to take the hint.
04:24 New York City had a series of smogs in the 1960s that affected more than 16 million people,
04:29 and black, soot-filled rain coated Boston around the same time.
04:33 But eventually, lawmakers around the world stepped in.
04:35 Starting in the 1970s, laws got serious about limiting air pollution, forcing car companies
04:40 to make more efficient engines, and factories to produce fewer emissions.
04:44 Because it turns out, turning air into poison, is not a great idea.
04:49 Thank you for watching this episode of SciShow, you’re great.
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05:07 [♪ OUTRO]