Smog Goes Global: A Bad Week in the Cities

THE world will end with a cough, a wheeze, a mass gasp of emphysema. So it seemed last week, a bad week, as dirty air smothered cities around the earth. Millions of smog-choked city dwellers began to feel like canaries in coal mines--obliged to perish in order to warn others of potential disaster. Rarely before had man's dependence on the fragile biosphere been so dramatically illustrated on a global scale.

In the U.S., polluted air hung like a filthy muslin curtain along the entire Atlantic Coast, from Boston south to Atlanta. Because of unusually stagnant winds and humid heat in the high 90s, Washington, D.C., was on the verge of the first smog alert in the capital's history. The hardest hit of all U.S. cities was New York (see following story), which declared a first-stage pollution alert and simultaneously reeled under a severe power shortage.

The worst conditions of all were in Japan, where a vast economic expansion has outraced the country's feeble efforts to control industrial and automobile pollution. Unlike the cars it exports to the U.S., for example, Japan's domestic autos are still not equipped with emission controls. In Tokyo, a long and dreary rainy season was broken by a surge of windless warm weather that suddenly worsened the poisoned air. Bright sunlight reacted with suspended auto exhaust to produce a photochemical miasma called "white smog." One day a group of children playing in a schoolyard had trouble breathing and began collapsing; they were treated for smog poisoning. In five choking days, more than 8,000 people in Tokyo were treated in hospitals for smarting eyes and sore throats. Thousands more carefully stayed indoors or tried not to exert themselves when venturing outside.

Belated Action. Stung by criticism as well as smog, Premier Eisaku Sato set up a central headquarters in Tokyo to coordinate efforts to deal with the pollution. City officials, meanwhile, rushed to complete what is ambitiously billed as "the world's quickest photochemical-smog warning system"--which means daily bulletins issued via radio and TV. So far, the smog is seeping across Japan faster than humans can chart it. On a hot, bright day last week, it reached Shikoku, smallest of Japan's four main islands, where more schoolchildren were suddenly afflicted with sore throats and eyes. Pollution experts later surmised that a freak wind had blown pollutants 70 miles across the Inland Sea from the industrial cities of Kobe, Kyoto and Osaka.

Japan had plenty of company. In Australia last week, residents of Sydney were outraged by an enveloping stink of rotten eggs, which turned out to be a massive belch of hydrogen sulfide. Though officials blamed the offensive odor on an oil company plant, they were unable to prosecute for "lack of sufficient evidence." Like the Japanese, though, they did begin at last to strengthen antipollution laws and enforcement measures of the kind that have lately been applied to Sydney's famous beaches, which are now fouled by a daily outpouring of 200 million gallons of sewage.

In Saigon, the proliferation of heavy military vehicles and hordes of civilian motor scooters has so increased smog that the once leafy shade trees of the city's elegant French-built boulevards are being reduced to skeletons. The famous umbrella pines along the Appian Way leading out of Rome are suffering the same fate. Dirty air is rotting the ancient Greek bronze horses in Venice's St. Mark's Square, and eating away the stone sculptures of West Germany's Cologne Cathedral. In Western Europe, air pollutants cross borders as easily as tourists. Sweden and Norway, for example, were recently caked with "black snow"--noxious particles, including high concentrations of sulfuric acid, wafted over from factories in the Ruhr, according to some Scandinavian scientists. Because of the smog problem, the Soviet Union has begun moving factories away from cities and building new ones in rural areas. Families are moving out of Johannesburg to escape a gray smog that blots out the bloodred South African sun. In Santiago, Chile's capital, a pall of smoke from autos, industries and incinerators often obscures the snowy peaks of the towering Andes. At the University of Buenos Aires last week, scientists staged a meeting to consider ways of combating thick columns of black smoke emitted by the city's buses.

The plethora of smog was a harbinger of things to come--unless cities around the globe take much faster and firmer steps to control the effluence of affluence that is rapidly making too many of them uninhabitable.

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