Infrastructure Done Wrong Will Kill You
Remember the Great Smog of London?
There are some scenes in The Crown, Season 1, Episode 4 in which fog covers the city of London. In one part Miss Venetia Scott (Winston Churchill’s imaginary secretary) is sitting in front of a hot stove. She’s wearing socks and mittens. The room is painfully cold. Her roommate leaves to go out to the bar. We notice ominously that something that looks like smoke filters into the room through a hole in the window. It’s December 4, 1952.
Over the next few days, the visibility in some areas is less than one yard. You can’t drive in those circumstances. So most Londoners walk. But not everyone stays home. So you’re still at risk of getting run over…
Even the trains, vaunted for being dependable in British life, stopped. By this time, city folk stopped calling it a fog; it was deeper, thicker, and stinkier (it smelled like rotten eggs).
It was a mass of greenish, yellow, unidentified smoke. The smoke plus fog became smog. Some called it the Great Pea Soup.
