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- A black-and-white, panoramic view of New York City as seen from a great height. A vast number of buildings and skyscrapers can be seen. A hazy, smoky gas overlays the entire city like a blanket, with a fairly clear skyline only in the far distance at the horizon. Near the closest buildings, the smog appears thin and wispy. The smog appears thicker and thicker around buildings that are farther away from the photographer's position, until shorter buildings near the horizon are almost entirely shrouded and impossible to see under a thick layer of smog. Near the horizon, the clustered tops of tall skyscrapers emerge from within the smog. (en)
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- 0001-11-25 (xsd:gMonthDay)
- The atmosphere of New York was bombarded with more man-made contaminants than any other big city in the country—almost two pounds of soot and noxious gases for every man, woman, and child. So great is the burden of pollution that were it not for the prevailing wind, New York City might have gone the way of Sodom and Gomorrah. (en)
- We were flying at about two thousand feet, through a curiously greasy-looking and pervasive haze. The ground could just be made out below—cars, roads, houses, all dim but visible.
Then we began to climb. In less than a minute the ground had vanished. Cars, roads, houses, the very earth itself had been blotted out. We were circling in bright sunlight, above an apparently limitless bank of opaque, polluted air. The smog extended to the horizon in every direction. At a distance, the slanting rays of the sun gave it a coppery, rather handsome appearance. Nearer at hand it merely looked yellow and ugly, like nothing so much as a vast and unappetizing sea of chicken soup. (en)
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- Two months ago, a mass of heavily polluted air—filled with poisons from incinerators, industrial furnaces, power plants, car, bus and truck engines—settled down upon the sixteen million people of Greater New York.
For four days, anyone going out on the streets inhaled chemical compounds that threatened his health. Those who remained inside had little protection from the noxious gases that passed freely through cooling and heating systems.
An estimated 80 persons died. Thousands of men and women already suffering from respiratory diseases lived out the four days in fear and pain.
Finally, the winds came, freeing the mass of air from the weather-trap that had held it so dangerously. The immediate crisis was ended. New Yorkers began to breathe "ordinary" air again.
"Ordinary" air in New York, as in most large cities, is filled with tons of pollutants: carbon monoxide from gasoline, diesel and jet engines, sulfur oxides from factories, apartment houses, and power plants; nitrogen oxides, hydrocarbons and a broad variety of other compounds. These poisons are not so dramatically dangerous most days of the year, as they were last Thanksgiving in New York. But steadily, insidiously, they damage virtually everything that exists. (en)
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