yea the good ole days of rivers on fire are no more. DAMN YOU EPA!!
lol Won't someone please think of the poor fishes who are so cold without their protective layer of fire?
Chattanooga was big enough to have a smog problem back then? Or were there other influences like industry or geography?
Yep, and both. Chattanooga had a lot of heavy industry, mostly foundries and coal furnaces, with little in the way of modern (for the day) pollution control. Railroads were also quite busy shipping out coal and passing through, and we're at the confluence of Interstates 24 (Nashville) and 75 (Knoxville) leading to Atlanta. Chattanooga was and remains a major communications hub for both Interstate and rail traffic. And we're situated with mountains on one side and a ridge (we call it a mountain, but it's a ridge) on the other, so smog tends to stay in the area and also down low due to temperature inversions. In fact, in 1969 the Department of Health, Education and Welfare declared Chattanooga the nation's most polluted city.
http://apcb.org/index.php/about-us/history
The Department of Health, Education and Welfare named Chattanooga the most polluted city in the nation. Chattanooga had a heavy industrial base, and in 1969, unregulated emissions from industries, railroads, and coal furnaces caused high concentrations of particulate matter. Chattanooga's topography compounded the problem by causing temperature inversions (during which cold air flows over the mountains into the valley and is trapped--with the pollution--by a layer of warm air).
These factors, along with deteriorating scenic views and rising national claims of pollution-related sickness, prompted the citizens, government, and industrial leaders in Chattanooga and Hamilton County to take drastic measures. They proposed air pollution control regulations. These measures had been debated for years, but suddenly became a priority.
The coal mines were shut down, the furnaces closed, the factories were first upgraded and then gradually closed or moved to China, the railroads declined and went to cleaner locomotives. But it was not until 1987 that Chattanooga air quality met federal standards. Then in 1997 the standards were lowered and we once again did not meet them, so many separate measures were instituted including mandatory emissions testing (which is a serious burden on the poor, but then, so is asthma) in order to regain compliance. We've been out of compliance since 2005 on particulate, but what this article does not mention is that this is as much a factor of the mountains and woodlands/meadows producing pollen as man-made pollution. And of course in 2008 the Feds reduced the levels once again and we've been out of compliance ever since. With our flora and topology, staying in particulate compliance year round is very, very difficult. They don't call them the Smoky Mountains for nothing, and even the Smoky Mountain National Park sometimes falls above allowable federal particulate levels.
Before we were the Scenic City, we were the "I think maybe I can see it now that we're within a couple blocks" City. We also had some very, very polluted creeks (coal tar mostly but some major PCBs as well) as well as having an old federal TNT plant which over half a decade manufactured many different explosives which was one of the nation's worst contaminated sites. In some places, several feet of soil was removed and carried away in rail cars to be incinerated. We also had several years of near-nightly late night trips of heavy lift helicopter troops - my house was directly in their flight path. Nothing like being awakened in the middle of the night by a million candlepower light and the sound of a half dozen heavy lift choppers passing over your house at near treetop level, vibrating things off shelves.
Today the old TNT reservation is a thriving industrial park including Volkswagen's manufacturing plant and most of the sedimentary pollution has been dredged up and removed. But the process took years of hard, expensive work.
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