[Narrator:] In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth. [Narrator:] In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth. [Waves crashing] [Waves crashing] He gathered the waters together and let the dry land appear. [Music] He created the fish of the sea... [Water splashing] and the birds of the air. [Seagulls squawking] And he brought man into the world. [Jet engine] And man looked around him and decided there was room for improvement. [Jet engine] [Airline pilot:] We've got the... uh... misconception seems to be prevalent that smoke is a local problem. A man in Town X, he says, we can solve our smoke problem. We just put the stacks on the downwind side of town. Well, which town is he talking about? His town? The town next to him? The town downwind of him? The other day, we're on a trip from Washington to Houston non-stop, and we take off, we're in the smoke, we climb up to 31,000, we stay in the smoke. So we get into Houston and I run into Mungie, and he's coming down on a flight out of New York following the same route we came down, and I said, Mungie, how about the smoke? Did you ever see it so high? I was in it at 31,000. And he said, I got news for you, neighbor. I was at 35 and I didn't top it either. So it's not local. This smoke may have come from, uh... Texas, it could have come from California, anywhere. [Beware the Wind] [Narrator:] Below him for mile after mile, a dense blanket of smoke obscures the ground, dangerous to him. [Music] More dangerous to the man on the ground who's breathing it. What the man on the ground is breathing today and what blocks the pilot's vision, actually consists of many things. [Fire crackling] Burning is the main source. We burn off the land to plant new crops, new timber, new orchards. We burn to keep warm. And we burn to provide our power. [Train moving] We burn our way to work every day and to the store and church and the movies. Cars are power plants, and 80 million of them are in use in the country. [Music] In his drive to destroy and to recreate, man scatters something else into the atmosphere, dust. [Music] Crushing, grinding, sifting, cutting, pulverizing, creating for comfort and well-being and creating dust. [Music] The natural sources of pollution are infinite. We've learned to blend them and transform them. [...] Solids are transformed into liquids, liquids are transformed into gases, and into the air leaks poison. Each year, 130 million tons of it. And often, it kills. [Music] If it were evenly distributed across the country, it would cause little ill effect. But more than half of us live in cities on 1 percent of the land. [Music] And the air is not inexhaustible. [Music] Of the 93 million miles of space between the earth and the sun, only the first seven and one-half miles can sustain life. [Music] Our envelope of air is thin, almost like the skin of an apple. [Music] And then, not all of those seven and one half miles directly above us is usable. Many pollutants are heavy, and they harbor close to the ground. [Music] As in Fairbanks, Alaska, an ice fog holds the pollutants very close to the ground. [Music] At the airport, the cold lower air is unable to move upwards. [Music] Some cities are located in natural traps. In Los Angeles, eight million people breathe the poison which they themselves create every day. [Music] Many harmful chemical by-products have been identified in the exhaust of the family automobile. Many of these are toxic. Even a perfectly tuned engine, purring away under laboratory conditions, wastes at least two percent of the fuel poured into it. [Music] Most cars on the road waste much more than that. A few throw as much as 50 percent of the wasted fuel into the air. The bulk of your car's exhaust is made up of invisible carbon monoxide. And most people think of it as dangerous only in an enclosed garage. [Music] But scientists have established a maximum level on the amount of carbon monoxide that you can safely breathe. [Music] The car that stops and idles bumper to bumper in front of you pumps four times that maximum level directly into your car. [Music] Our transportation industry is the greatest contaminator of air in the country, annually corrupting our lungs with 85 million tons of unburned petroleum. Here's a particularly dangerous situation. Not the factory by itself, nor the traffic by itself, but the two joining forces. [Music] The cancer-inducing agent being exhausted by the automobile cannot by itself settle in your respiratory system. It's too light, and it's immediately exhaled. But it combines readily with dust, soot and other matter, and in this form will remain in your body. America has no monopoly on pollution. All of us have seen the travel posters of sunlit Europe, [Music] and sometime or other, most of us have longed to escape to those old and gentle places, [Music] to Paris perhaps, or Brussels, or Rome, or Madrid, or Heidelberg, or Athens, or Ulm, or Stockholm, or Amsterdam, Cologne. [Church bell ringing] [Music] This is where beauty is: The majesty of cathedrals, the charm of old houses, [Music] but if we look behind the travel posters, we find this. [Music] If we look closer at the water in those fountains, this, and at those timeless faces, and the calm water flowing beside the old buildings. [Music] The causes are the same in Europe as in the United States. The demands of industry, the drive to increase the country's wealth. [Engine noises] Already in those romantic European capitals, lights come on early in the day, because of a man-made darkness. [Music] The cathedrals, which took generations to build, which have been the pride of European cities for centuries, are being corroded away, victims of industrial and automotive waste. [Music] More damage has been done since the turn of the century than the cumulative effect of all the hundreds of years that have gone before. [Music] Still deadlier compounds are produced with the help of the sun: photochemicals. It's vital to discover the contaminating effect of these on plants and animals. [Music] Dr. Brandt of the Robert A.Taft Center in Cincinnati is a highly-qualified researcher in the field of air pollution. [Music] [Dr. C.S. Brandt:] This is the photochemical smog problem that you associate with Los Angeles. Actually, it now occurs all over the country. This injury that you see on tobacco is due to ozone, one of the photochemical smog components. And this injury that you see on beans is also ozone. Now, there are other components in the photochemical smog complex that we have not identified, and that's the type of injury that you see here on this spinach. [Narrator:] In the greenhouse, the poisoning of plants is controlled and studied in an attempt to isolate the sources of man-made blights, such as this one, that affected the orange grove of Mr. and Mrs. Dobbs of Polk County, Florida. [Music] [Mrs. Dobbs:] We saw evidence where the bloom and the little tiny fruit was on the trees, and it has already dropped off in a month's time or less than that. We will have no fruit at all. This happened last year, the year before. [...] [Narrator:] Now this grove was planted not long before the Dobbs' planted theirs. The only difference is that it's 50 miles further away from the source of the Dobbs' trouble. [Music] And this is the source: old dinosaur bones, one of the richest deposits in the country. ['Phosphate Valley Exposition' billboard] Recovering phosphate from the skeletal remains of prehistoric animals is big business, and it's one of the most serious sources of air pollutants. [Music] The chemical processes release tons of fluoride gas. [Music] The fluoride, carried by the wind across this open country, settles upon the plants and in the water. To date, this one cluster of phosphate factories has forced the citrus growers in Polk County to abandon 25,000 acres of top-quality grove land. [Music] More pathetic is the effect on cattle. They consume the poisoned grass and water, and the fluorides slowly destroy them. [Music] [Rancher:] We have cut those joints open, and in a normal cow, it's got a juice in there, grease, that oils it, and you've got smooth places that's run together. But all that smooth, polished part of a joint becomes rough and grated and there's no oil in it, and it makes 'em so sore and so stiff, they just can't go. [Narrator:] Another local landowner commented: [Landowner:] And the phosphate industry here in Polk County, Florida and surrounding counties is continually reaching for more land and processing more material, and increasing the size of its business, not only here, but in northern Florida and North Carolina. [Narrator:] Air pollutants respect neither plant, animal, nor human being. Here, along the Monongahela River, 22 miles south of Pittsburgh, is the borough of Donora. Typical of many industrial towns, Donora had all the ingredients for disaster. [Music] It's built low along the river and hemmed in by steep hills that act as effective wind breaks. Its streets are hilly, with plenty of low pockets to trap the air. The entire area is one large pollutant source. Steel mills, sulfuric acid plants, heavy river traffic, and the freight yards. This is the way it was in October 1948, when an area-wide temperature inversion closed in. Hot moist airs hung over the city, entrapping the cooler stagnant air in the pockets below. No air could blow out, no air could rise. Donora was airtight. [Music] It took only two days for 6,000 people to become seriously ill, and for twenty of them to die. [Music] Since the disaster, little in Donora has changed. Exhaustive medical investigation uncovered a significant fact. No single gas was present in sufficient quantity to have caused these deaths. But the gas acting in combination with metallic dust clouds from other mills formed highly irritating and sometimes lethal secondary compounds. [Music] With thousands of new chemical compounds being identified, there's no possible way to foresee the reactions and interactions as the exhaust gases and dusts of different factories blend together in the skies above our cities. [Music] This is Phoenix, traditionally the last resort for lung sufferers. But Phoenix, according to the Public Health Service National Air Sampling Network, is the second worst city is the second worst city in the country in concentrations of smoke, fumes and dust. [Music] Even Denver, a mile high, has a problem that's potentially critical. [Music] Washington, the least industrialized city in the world, is becoming one of the most polluted. Why? Washington has a greater concentration of cars than any other city, 4,000 per square mile. San Francisco looks clean, but recently, it has developed a pollution problem of its own, almost as bad as Los Angeles. Many of the gases hanging in the city are invisible. Its citizens are in just as much danger as those in Phoenix, Washington, and other cities considered clean. [Music] Chicago is one city already fighting air pollution. Combating air pollution is no different than fighting any public menace. It takes organization, money, strong protests by the local citizens, and a program of tough enforcement. [Music] [Pollution control dispatcher:] Air pollution unit 834, 834 come in please. [Man driving on highway:] 834, over. [Narrator:] An air pollution violation in Chicago is an offense against the public. It gets the rapid mechanized attack that a fire or a crime would receive. Even with an efficient and dedicated control board, answers are not always easy. [Music] [Pollution control officer:] We understand that something like 70,000 of these cars, this and similar type, are burned in the country each and every year. This is a complex problem, one which faces not only car dismantlers here in the Chicago area, but throughout the whole country. The uh... at the moment, an economic means of salvaging the steel hasn't been found. The group representing various car dismantlers, various governmental agencies, and research organizations are currently viewing this operation in Chicago with a view towards resolving or attempting to come about a solution to this problem. [Music] [Narrator:] At the same time, unusual sources are identified. Here in the heart of Chicago are its abandoned stockyards. [Chicago rep:] At one time, we had 40,000 people working in this area. Today it's a wasteland. And it's impossible to get new industry to come into our community because of the thousands of pigeons and because of the odors emanating from the rendering plants in the stockyards area. [Music] [Narrator:] William Bullock, who flies for the National Center for Atmospheric Research in Boulder, Colorado, is one of the many professional air samplers at work today. [Music] They fly sophisticated devices into the air to sample, classify, measure, and finally record. [William Bullock:] While flying in the state of Indiana and Illinois, I have seen the smoke plume from the steel mills in the Chicago-Gary complex as far out as 140 miles to the southeast of the Lake Michigan area. [Music] [Narrator:] There's only one effective way to clean up the air: Cut off the smoke plume. It was done here in Fontana, California by installing electrostatic precipitators. With the precipitators turned off, it takes only a few minutes for the plant to look exactly like any other steel mill. The precipitators remove as much as 98 percent of this pollutant material. [Music] Installation of these precipitators is a major expense for a large factory, but fumes are an even greater expense. Through ignorance and greed, most corporations refuse to admit there is a solution to their waste problem. There is no pollution problem that present-day technology cannot solve. [Music] Here in a Chicago incinerator, part of a city's refuse is being burned without polluting the air. Wherever you find clean stacks or clean air, you also find a local citizenry angered and united in action. Local air pollution control requires more than just one or two office workers. It requires communications, patrol cars, laboratories, and dedication. The city which wants to get rid of this, and this, ['Danger, fog and smoke' road sign] and this, will have to buy the radios, labs, and cars, and the dedication. [Music] To survive, a city must learn to meet its problems. It's expensive, and it demands strong laws and individual effort. [Music] Ingenuity and endeavor have created for us the highest material standard of living ever known. [Music] We can't go back to the beginning, but with only a small part of the ingenuity we brought to building our enormous wealth, we can ensure that the air which gives us life no longer brings us death. [An Airlie Production] [Executive producer: Murdock Head, M.D.] [Narrated by Robert Preston] [Photographed by George Voellmer] [Edited by Charles Francis] [in cooperation with George Washington University, Airlie Center] [District of Columbia Medical Society and the American Academy of General Practice] [...] [This program was supported in part by a research grant from the division of air pollution, United States Public Health Service] [...]