Portland’s air is bad thanks to Eagle Creek fire, but it doesn’t match London’s ‘Big Smoke’

PORTLAND — You can taste the air in Portland. Thanks to acrid conditions in the city from wildfires in the Columbia Gorge, officials recommend you stay indoors with the windows shut. If you have to be outside, you should wear a proper, high-quality mask.

This is pretty bad. But, of course, it’s far from the worst air-pollution event a major metropolis has seen in the modern era. That might be London’s “The Big Smoke.”

The 5-day catastrophe, caused by a high-pressure weather system and households burning coal during a prolonged cold snap, killed at least 4,000 Londoners in December of 1952. “The smoke-like pollution was so toxic,” London’s Met Office wrote, “it was even reported to have choked cows to death in the fields.”

The bovine massacre might be apocryphal, but the dire effects of the extreme pollution were very real. Visibility was zero in Britain’s capital, bringing air travel and even river transit to a halt. In many parts of London, pedestrians couldn’t see their own feet, and they slipped on “black ooze” that coated the streets and sidewalks.

The national government was “at least partly to blame,” The Guardian wrote in 2012. “To maximize revenue, [the United Kingdom] was exporting its clean coal and keeping the sulphur-laden ‘dirty’ coal for U.K. power stations and domestic fires. The result was a combination of soot-laden air and droplets of sulphuric acid lying in a 200-foot-deep blanket across London, leading to the worst smog ever recorded.”

The horrible “pea souper” started on Friday, Dec. 5, when the city’s usual morning fog turned a “sickly shade of yellowish brown.” An unusual “temperature inversion,” The History Channel stated, “trapped the stagnant, cold air at ground level.”

The disaster, recently featured on an episode of the popular Netflix TV series “The Crown,” prompted a clean-air law that mandated the use of smokeless fuel. Despite the environmental law, and others that followed, dangerous smog continues to plague Britain’s capital city.