Short Stuff: Great Smog of London

and they were both great. Poor London, I mean, come on, there's a lot of terrible things happening in the air over there, and technically it's their own fault, but still you hate, you hate for that to happen to anybody, that's right. Uh. This was a smog in ninety two, specifically December five, when the day started alf okay, but then, as it is London, Uh, not surprising if fog starts to roll len as it often does. But then this fog combined with the smoke of London at the time,

which we'll get into. Uh, smoke plus fog equals smog. It's settled in and kind of parked it there for quite a few days. And it was bad. It was really bad. And it's really saying something that that it was so bad that London even named it. Because London was, like you said, very known for fog, it was also really well known for small Apparently complaints about the small problems um have been recorded as far back as the thirteenth century in London, so they've had smog for a

long time. And apparently it was somebody from London who coined the term smag to begin with. So they knew their fog, they knew their smag, and this one combined was so bad that they named it the Great Smag. It was just that bad. And it's it's hard but also easy and kind of fun to get across how bad this small was because it did all sorts of

terrible stuff to the city and the people who lived there. Yeah, I mean, you've got uh, you've got factories pumping out smoke at the time, you've got people's own chimneys pumping out smoke. This was December, so there were fires going

all over the place. You had cars. I think they had gone from electric trams to diesel buses recently, so there was a ton of smoke uh, combining with that fog to make it a very caustic situation to the point where you know, of course it's England, so they're gonna be like, it's all fine, cheerio, and you'll go about our day. Uh. And they did their best, but even within that first day it started to literally shut

things down. It did. UM. It shut things down in that like you you if you were driving at the time, or you tried to get your car out, um, you like you would just end up abandoning on the street. It was too dangerous to continue on. UM. All of the shipping uh. Transportation on the Thames stopped. UM. There

there was some bus service. I saw in a history dot com article that some of the bobbies would would walk slowly in front of the buses that we're trying to operate with like a flashlight, um, just to serve as like a beacon for them to follow through this and even that proved to be too much. The only way to get around was the underground, which was brilliantly located underground and away from the small but even the indoors wasn't safe right yeah, but first of all, you're

talking about cars. Are you saying that someone might leave their flat and go down to their garage to get in the car and it would be so bad they might get scared and hide in their boot. Oh man, that was beautiful. You just earned us a lot more British listeners. I think a lot more pins. M I think he just lost a few. Okay, Uh, yeah, things were bad indoors. I think there were reports of um movie theaters that couldn't show the movie because you couldn't

the screen. Uh. There were reports of people not being able to see their feet, walking around, standing up, not being able to look down. I wish I knew the British word for feet, uh shods. They couldn't see their shods, but it spelled Okay, that's great, but imagine that. Imagine looking down and they're smag, not just fog, smog that is making a choke and cough and weeze. It's so thick that you cannot see your own feet. This is part of the problem. I did not see this. I

couldn't find confirmation of this. Humi told me about this, and she was reading me some stuff about it. One of the things she found was that people would would accidentally walk into the Thames and they couldn't get out because they couldn't see the Thames from the smog, and they were drowned. Like it was working as a research a system pretty pretty much. Yeah, I got on the tay roll. How do I get that? You already have that buddy? Who's that? Oh? I thought you meant like,

how do you get that role? Oh? How do I get it for myself? I don't know. Um, I don't know. How about your daughter, she's getting to reading age. Yeah, she's not into this trainer, young Chuck. I'm trying to I get We get emails from people are like, oh, my kid is six or seven and they listen to the show. I'm like, really, all right, I think it's just not it's not so much that she's not into it's just that's where her dad does. And who finds

whatever their dad does interesting? Nobody. She flipped out when we were on Jeopardy. Oh did she really what she think about that? I mean, we watched Jeopardy, so she just thought it was the coolest thing ever. Oh, that's really cool. So it wasn't like a special like sit here and be quiet and watched this TV show that you've never heard of before. Thinks she watches Jeopardy does. She watches it some with me, and she every time I answer a question first, she's like, she thinks it's

some kind of weird black magic. So that's the thing that I think that proves my point. She is into it and smart and curious. It's just that she's not into whatever her dad's job is. That's what I think it is. Yeah, I mean she loves story pirates, that's her jam Pete's right, Yeah, I was made by our friend, in part by our friend Peter McNerney. And I keep telling her Peter and Beth and their family came to Georgia and we all went to the lake together a

few years ago. And I keep telling it was like, you know, Peter, he went to the lake with us. She's like really, And I'll show her pictures and she's like, that's him. I don't remember that. Hey, that's the guy from the valveoline commercial. That's the guy from the A T and T commercial. He was in a super Bowl spot. He's in tons of stuff, all right, So enough with Peter McNerney. Let's take a break. And we'll talk more

about the smog right after this. Yeah, mm hmmm. So it's really fun to talk about all the stuff that just went awry during this this fog. Like you said, people couldn't see movies anymore because there's so much smog that came in unless it was awful true, Um, like ambulance is not being able to run or people walking into the Thames, right what about what about robberies and perch snatchings increasing? Sure, you're gonna have an increase in crime when all those uh oh, there's a good word

British word for criminal. I can't think of it, but I don't know they would they would definitely per snatch with that heavy fog. Yeah, man, whatever they call either cat burglar. Yeah, well, at any rate. Um. One of the other things that happened to Chuck reportedly was that an entire um heard of cattle in nearby Smithfield. I

believe Um died choke to death on it. And that really reveals like just how how much this this how bad this was And and I don't know if we've said it or not yet, but this didn't go on like just on December, Um, December five, this went on for five days, and it kept getting worse. And the whole reason it kept getting worse is because remember our heat waves episode. Yes, so an anti cyclone uh a UM,

I believe a high pressure system settled over London. It was thirty miles wide and settled over London, and it basically kept any breeze and air at bay. So all of those smoke sacks and emissions and all that stuff just kept building and building and building, and they were trapped at roughly surface level. Uh. And over five days they just kept going because this this low or this high pressure system would not move, and finally went out to see on December ninth. That's right. Uh. And in

the meantime, it exacted a very large health toll. Uh. There have been differing numbers on people that they can directly attribute to dying as a result of the Great Smog. I think back then they said it was about four thousand people. Uh. These days people say it might be more like twelve thousand people. Yeah. Uh, that is an astounding number of people to um. And you know, granted some of these people were probably had you know, breathing issues or asthmatic or co op D, but it would

push them to death. I don't know about like completely healthy people that died within those five days, but twelve thousand people is a lot of people. No matari usslice it Yeah, over five dayste that wouldn't I mean, the point is these people wouldn't have otherwise died. That's those like directly attributable to this. And it was so bad that the British government basically was forced to act. Um they came up four years later with the Clean Air Act.

And this is the fifties and they're coming up with a Clean Air Act. Like when you think about environmental policy and in movements and stuff, you typically think of nineteen seventies like the beginning of that. That's how bad this small was. That they came out with a Clean Air Act in nineteen fifties six directly because of that

small event. Yeah, I mean l A. I remember when I was living there, people would say, Man, can you imagine living here in the nineteen fifties, and like when it was just so clean and beautiful, and the nineteen fifties and l A were awful, terrible, terrible smag back then. And the smog I think got worse in l A through the seventies and then things started getting better. But it's way better now than it ever used to be, as well as in London, thanks to stuff like the

Clean Air Act. And then I think later on, uh, there was another small crisis in sixty two where they I think they added some more teeth to the Clean Air Act. But you know, basically they offered a lot of incentives, they offered a lot of restrictions on industry and you know people, but they also said, hey, why don't we try things like electricity or natural gas or oil, and we set of burning this coal all over the place and it worked. I don't believe there's been a

great smog since nineteen sixty two. So way to go, London, way to pull it out, Go London. Ah, you got anything else, I've got nothing else except to say that we want to one day come back to London and do more live shows. Yeah, totally agreed. And um. In the meantime, thank you for listening London, Thank you for listening to the rest of the world, and thank you most of all, Chuck. I think we can say to you me for coming up with this one too. Oh

it was her idea. Yes, she's the one who told me about we gotta get her on the on the payroll. I got her covering. Okay, okay, Uh, everybody's short stuff is that stuff you should know is a production of I Heart Radio. For more podcasts my heart Radio, visit the i heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.