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The following is an archived discussion of a featured article nomination. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the article's talk page or in Wikipedia talk:Featured article candidates. No further edits should be made to this page.

The article was promoted by Ian Rose via FACBot (talk) 07:33, 18 June 2017 [1].

1966 New York City smog

[edit]
Nominator(s): —BLZ · talk 01:33, 26 April 2017 (UTC)[reply]

Last year, during an introductory lecture for a law school course on environmental policy, I listened as the professor called this smog event one of the defining moments that kickstarted America's awareness of environmental problems. Surprised to find that there was no Wikipedia page for it yet, I started to do some research. I drafted up this article just in time for it to be sit on the homepage for DYK on its 50th anniversary. Since then, it's passed GA and expanded to a point that I believe is FA-worthy. This is my first time working at length on an article about something other than music, so I enjoyed the challenge and change of pace tackling a subject matter other than music for once (and I hope any FA reviewers do, too.)

I believe I have given this topic the thorough treatment that it warrants, given its somewhat under-appreciated status as a major disaster that spurred effective political change at the national level. I believe this article meets all the FA criteria, particularly for research and comprehensiveness. Several sources are either behind the NY Times archive paywall or are law review articles that I accessed through the Westlaw database; please let me know if there are any subscription barriers that I can assist with if you have a question about a source. Most of the relevant passages of book sources are available through Google Books or Amazon preview. My sincere thanks in advance to any and all reviewers. —BLZ · talk 01:33, 26 April 2017 (UTC)[reply]

Support Comments from Syek88

[edit]

This is a very good, extensively researched article which I have little doubt I will support. In the meantime, some comments:

  • "City health officials initially maintained that the smog had not caused any excess deaths." – "deaths" might be better than "excess deaths" here. We haven't yet reached the footnote that explains what excess deaths are. And a death caused by the smog is by definition an "excess death", so "excess" seems unnecessary anyway.
  • You are exactly right, "excess death" is just the method to measure causation of deaths and is redundant or even misleading in that sentence. Good catch.
  • "The smog served as a catalyst for greater national awareness of air pollution as a serious health problem and political issue." – I’m not sure you intend to say there was "greater national awareness of air pollution as a … political issue". Rather, air pollution simply became a bigger (however described) political issue.
  • Maybe an alternate wording would be clearer, but I think that the wording is accurate. The situation prior to 1966 wasn't that environmental issues were at the forefront of political discourse, but popular support of environmentalism happened to be low. Rather, problems like pollution were not widely conceived of as political issues—that is, problems with a political solution—at all, certainly not to the extent that it became a hot political topic in the late 60s and early 70s. So there was not only an increase in political support, but also an increase in general understanding of environmental problems as political.
  • "An estimated 220–240 people died during the six-day 1953 smog, and an estimated 300–405 people died during the two-week 1963 fog." – This sentence needs to make it clear that the numbers given are for excess deaths, not total deaths. Also, is "fog" correct?
  • Fog is definitely not correct! My mind must have been foggy when I typed that. I've reworded the sentence to describe the causal relationship more accurately.
  • "Other episodes of smog occurred in the city" – "had occurred"?... to make it clear that we are still talking about pre-1963 episodes?
  • Fixed.
  • "Starting in 1953, the city opened a laboratory to monitor pollution..." – not sure what "starting in..." is doing here. Did it not simply open in 1953?
  • I removed "starting," but kept "in 1953" at the beginning of the sentence. It could also be worded "opened in 1953" if you think that's better, I don't have a strong preference.
  • There is a sentence with two mentions of the word "corresponding", which isn’t ideal for readability.
  • Fixed.
  • "served as a poor gauge of the air across all of New York City." Is "all of" necessary?
  • I've reworded this sentence with a few changes. The relevant part now reads: "the index reflected conditions in that small area, but served as a poor gauge of overall air quality across the entire city." The phrasing "all of" was not ideal, but I think there should be wording that suggests the entire area of the city.
  • "Scientists, city officials, and the public knew that New York City had a serious air-pollution problem prior to the 1966 smog episode." – I'd suggest re-arranging this sentence so that it is clear that “prior to” attaches not to the problem but the scientists, etc, knowing about it.
  • I've reworded this, let me know if you think the newer version is better.
  • Yes - this looks good now.
  • The purpose served by the comparison with the Donora and London smogs is not entirely clear to me.
  • I'll elaborate a bit about why I included that paragraph. In the aftermath of this smog, which shocked the public (and the media) in its severity, people went in search of precedents to understand the problem. Since air pollution had not been so widely publicized before, there was no frame of reference or yardstick by which to understand the present. An alarmed public was asking, "has something like this ever happened before?" The two points of reference at hand were Donora (which occurred in a small town, but was very severe and was American) and London (which was very severe and occurred in a global metropolis). The paragraph also informs modern readers, who likely want to know how bad smog events from roughly the same era had been. Since intense episodes of smog are now rare in the English-speaking world, I think the comparison is useful for most readers.
  • "It is difficult to address a given environmental problem without affecting others. Those undesired side effects can be foreseeable or unforeseeable, and are often related to a city's limited resources." – These sentences don’t have a reference. It’s not clear whether they are expressing the views of Mayor Lindsay or are in the voice of Wikipedia.
  • I've reworded and cited that passage.
  • "Despite general awareness of the health and environmental impacts of smog, other problems took priority" – This summary of the New York Times quote that follows is unnecessary and repetitive (to the point of using largely the same words).
  • You're right; I've reworded it to chop down most of the quote, but retained the part that lists what the other priorities were.
  • The final four paragraphs of the article get progressively less relevant, in my view. The second paragraph says no more than "other things have been compared to the 1966 smog" and mentions ad hoc journalistic comparisons that aren't likely to be of much significance. The third paragraph lowers the tone of an otherwise sober, scientific article. The fourth and final paragraph places too much weight upon recent political events and reads to the cynical eye like an opportunistic way to talk about Donald Trump. The discussion in that paragraph certainly belongs in Environmental policy of the Donald Trump administration, but does it belong here?
  • I've responded to your comment on the legacy section at length below. I'm responding in general terms, mostly on broad POV or notability grounds since those are your concerns. If you have specific feedback about the wording in a sentence, sourcing, or another issue, I can respond again more specifically; I'm certainly open to editing the text if you think specific parts could be improved, but in the big picture I think these paragraphs are justified.
Response re: "Legacy" section
  • On the paragraphs about comparisons to China: smog events are generally rare compared to, for example, hurricanes (which I choose because they are 1. disasters and 2. a well-covered topic on Wikipedia). It would be inappropriate to include a whole section in a hurricane article about when that hurricane was referenced in the press as a comparison; a sentence like "Other hurricanes have been compared to Hurricane Katrina" would be silly because hurricanes occur annually and the meteorological methods used to measure hurricanes are more precise and widely understood. If I say "category five," non-experts immediately know what that means; similarly, the "Richter scale" is a household term; but methods of measuring smog are not as familiar or universal.
  • Since these events are not as familiar, people and the press seek out past historical events to use as yardsticks. Just like comparisons to Donora and London in the past, we look backward—have to look backward—to contextualize modern air pollution. Newspaper readers see shocking photos of heavy smog in China, but they may not know that the problem was once nearly as bad in places like the United States or England (in fact, it was worse in London). And unlike hurricanes or earthquakes, air pollution is a more readily solvable problem: the reason American readers aren't acquainted with extreme smog events is the Clean Air Act. Including these comparisons is especially because smog in China is often treated as a "foreign" problem, something unique to Asia, rather than a problem of the whole industrialized world and Anglo-American history particularly.
  • I think the pop culture references are useful to include because it shows that the smog was notable enough to factor into the contemporary cultural imagination. If the tone differs from the rest of the article, it is only to suit a different aspect than the scientific and political discussion that prevails. To give a digression that fleshes out the importance of this paragraph, in my mind: a problem I had while writing this article was that "smog" can mean both the general condition and a particular episode/event—imagine having the word "rain," but not "storm." Smog tends to be thought of as a chronic condition like weather (LA is "hazy" or "smoggy" just as Seattle is "rainy") rather than as a force that can erupt into intense, fatal "storms" that can become part of history as discrete events. The pop-culture references are remembrances not just of smog, but a particular smog that is notable and remembered in its own right. The Mad Men episode is notable for a few reasons: 1) Mad Men is a major, epic, and widely popular narrative work about New York in the 1960s, and the show's cultural importance makes the episode-long treatment of the smog notable; 2) including the smog is an example of the show's commendable historical accuracy; and 3) most interesting to me personally, the episode (as analyzed by the AV Club critic) is a demonstration that air pollution can have literary qualities (symbolic/thematic significance, parallels to a human character's mood or circumstances) as weather and disasters often do in fiction. For comparison, Hurricane Katrina in fiction is its own separate article because that hurricane weighs tremendously on the popular imagination (although looking at that article for the first time I'm sad to report that it's currently just a list rather than an article-length exploration of the topic in all its dimensions.) Of course, this smog is not nearly as prominent in the American imagination as Hurricane Katrina, but it's critical to note the few important ways it has manifested in culture.
  • Finally, I justify the final paragraph about Trump on similar grounds as the section on Donora/London and the section on China. Every once in a while, something happens that makes past smog events like this one bubble up in the collective memory. It is notable that this smog has come up repeatedly in discussion of Trump's policies, or more precisely, that it is used as a case-in-point. The sources certainly have a POV, but all I've done is reported their POV and how this smog has factored into political discourse. I don't believe any of those sources are so marginal or so wildly off-base that they don't merit a mention. What is notable here (that would not be notable in the article Environmental policy of the Donald Trump administration) is that this smog is an event chosen by writers to illustrate potential problems. It makes abstractions like environmental policy more real to readers who may not otherwise recognize or remember a pre-EPA world and may take the EPA "for granted" because accomplishments like clean air are literally invisible.
  • Here's why I think the Trump discussion is not merely "cynical" or "opportunistic," a concern I take seriously since he has only recently taken office and is highly controversial. First, I took care to write that paragraph in a way that avoids the pitfalls of weasel words: I've precisely attributed the sources in the main text and described their commentary and rhetorical use of the smog in measured, accurate terms. Second, the cited discussion is, while POV, proportional to Trump's articulated proposals and very real power, so it is not mere sensationalism or hand-wringing. It would be cynical or opportunistic if these sources had all evoked the smog in light of modest environmental-regulatory rollbacks, but what Trump has pitched is more severe than past administrations. Analogously, we might say that it would be cynical or opportunistic if a writer evoked the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire because a conservative president proposed minor budget cuts to the Occupational Safety and Health Administration, but the comparison might be less cynical if a president proposed more drastic cuts or the rollback of long-established regulations. That's why the comparisons are proportional: just as the problem of smog was once addressed by specific federal political action, it may very well be reintroduced by an opposite political force. That is, Trump's policies have occasioned reflections on this smog not just because Trump is conservative and/or because the writers dislike him—no doubt those same writers did not like George W. Bush's environmental policies either, but Bush's policies did not go so far as to threaten the existence of the agency credited with dramatically reducing air pollution, and thus did not evoke a specific threat of a resurgence of urban smog. As written, I don't believe the paragraph has POV or recentism problems: the focus is not undue or biased (I don't extrapolate, or say that Trump's proposed policies will bring smog back to New York), nor does the paragraph disproportionately dominate the article, it just explains another purpose that this event has served as a historical memory. The long-term "legacy" of a disaster, after all, is just a description of why and when "we" remember it.

I also made some minor copy-edits. --Syek88 (talk) 07:50, 27 April 2017 (UTC)[reply]

@Syek88: Thank you for your prompt feedback and thorough copyediting. I've responded to all of your comments above, at length where necessary. —BLZ · talk 21:02, 27 April 2017 (UTC)[reply]
I am sorry for taking so long to return to this. I haven't had much time available lately, and did not want to do a quick skim. I don't quite agree with the justifications for the final four paragraphs, especially the final two, but the justifications are certainly reasonable, and it would be most unreasonable for me to withhold support merely because I do not agree with them all. I am also mindful that no other reviewer has joined the issue. In these circumstances deference to the author is appropriate. Overall the article is in my opinion better than the average successful Featured Article candidate that I have seen recently. It meets the criteria. I am happy to support. Syek88 (talk) 23:28, 5 May 2017 (UTC)[reply]

Comments by Wehwalt

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I'm doing this offline and my some of my comments may have been cleared up already.

  • "It was the third major smog event in New York City, following smogs of similar scale in 1953 and 1963." I would lose the repetition, that is the "smogs", by substituting some synonym, or possibly "events".
  • I've reworded it to "It was the third major smog in New York City, following events of similar scale in 1953 and 1963."
  • " Today, the smog has served as a milestone" I might say, "The 1966 smog is now a milestone" as "today" feels awkward with "has served".
  • Reworded, now reads: "The 1966 smog is a milestone that has been used for comparison with . . ."
  • I would suggest re-ordering the subsections in the Background section to put the "Warnings" first. It contains basic information, such as the sources of the smog, that help the reader understand what things were like in 1966.
  • I see what you mean; I've rearranged a bit and retitled a subsection. The "basic information" parts of the "Warnings" section has been moved to the first section, which I've retitled from "Previous smogs" to "Smog before 1966". I've left "Warnings" as the last section, and now that title is more strictly accurate as a section just about specific warnings about the possibility of a disaster, not just general awareness of smog as a problem. I want to keep "Warnings" last because it keeps the Background section as a whole roughly chronological, and I think it should follow the "City air monitoring" since the warnings were only possible with the ability to measure smog.
  • "Starting in 1953, the city opened a laboratory to monitor pollution" I would omit "Starting".
  • Fixed by a prior edit responding to Syek88's review
  • "the city developed a corresponding air-pollution alert system with three stages of alert, matching increasingly severe levels of pollution with corresponding city countermeasures." I would strike the second-to-last word, "city" as not needed.
  • Agree, fixed
  • "headquartered in Columbus Circle" I would suggest "at" for "in".
  • Fixed
  • "was authorized in 1962 by New York and New Jersey to oversee air pollution issues" The state of New York or the city?
  • The state. I haven't written about New York (city or state) prior to this article, so I wasn't sure about the best way to avoid confusion between the two. I chose to always call the city "New York City" or "the city" and reserved "New York" for the state. I also tried to limit instances where using "New York" alone could be confusing, so it typically comes up in relation to other states or with other cues that indicate the sentence is about the state. In that paragraph, I intended "Interstate Sanitation Commission" and "New York and New Jersey" would clear up that it's the state.
  • "The sources of the smog were particulate and chemical matter from factories, chimneys, and vehicles" "matter" reads oddly. Can we say "pollutants"?
  • Reworded to "The material sources of the smog were particulates and chemicals from . . ." The word "pollutants" would be too general here, since that word describes what the matter does (matter that pollutes) rather than what it is (what kind of material it is).
  • "The unusually heavy smog was evident to the crowd of one million onlookers at the Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade on November 24.[2] Tabloids and newspapers that ordinarily ran front-page stories about the Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade instead carried stories about the smog." consider shortening the second Macy's etc. to "parade".
  • Fixed
  • "requesting an emergency meeting with New York Governor Nelson Rockefeller, New Jersey Governor Richard J. Hughes, and other regional leaders." for clarity, I would add "be held" after "meeting" and "present" at the end of the sentence.
  • Reworded
  • "for the New York metropolitan area, including areas in New Jersey and Connecticut," to avoid repetition, I would suggest "parts of" for "areas in".
  • Reworded
  • "the city asked commuters to voluntarily stop driving unless necessary, apartment buildings to stop incinerating their residents' garbage, and apartment buildings to reduce their heating to 60 °F." I might suggest, "the city asked commuters to stay home unless necessary, and apartment buildings to stop burning residents' garbage and turn heating down 60°F.".
  • Reworded (used your suggestion except "to stay home" —> "to avoid driving")
  • "New Jersey and Connecticut asked their residents to voluntarily reduce consumption of heating, electricity, and transportation." maybe "New Jersey and Connecticut asked their residents not to travel, and to use less power and heat."
  • Reworded
  • "if the wind did not come, a first-stage alert would likely remain in effect and it may become necessary to declare a second-stage alert" "may" should be "might".
  • Fixed
  • " chocked up" This seems a bit informal. Maybe "attributed"?
  • Reworded
  • "Hundreds of sanitation workers worked overtime to transport garbage to landfills in the Bronx, Brooklyn, and Staten Island,[24] with the bulk going to Fresh Kills Landfill in Staten Island." I might simply refer to it as "Fresh Kills" to avoid the repetition. It's clear from context it was a landfill.
  • Reworded
  • "The earliest report of casualties came when President Lyndon B. Johnson delivered a message delivered to Congress on January 30, 1967. " There is a redundancy problem in this sentence ("delivered" x2) Was this his State of the Union speech? If so, I would mention it as that increases the importance placed on it.
  • A "special message" from the president to Congress is formal, but is not necessarily delivered as a speech; it can just be a written letter. Such messages typically address a specific problem and request legislative action; while these messages are formal, they are less formal than State of the Union messages (which are constitutionally required and expected to be delivered as speeches) and less sweeping due to their focus on a single subject matter. There's no indication that this particular message was delivered as a speech. This source discusses LBJ's decision to deliver a voting-rights message as a speech, and helpfully notes that "[p]residents rarely deliver special messages to Congress in person to advocate for a specific bill, especially on domestic policy." In addition to removing the duplicate word, I switched out the ambiguous "delivered" (since both a speech or letter can be "delivered") and replaced it with "sent".
  • "Two major medical studies have analyzed . Leonard Greenburg — " There is a stray space before the period, but also "analyzed" requires something to analyze.
  • Another reviewer fixed this.
  • There is uncited matter in the "Urban Life" section.
  • I tightened up the sourcing there in response to Syek88's comments.
  • I might tighten that section a bit by citing examples from New York City of how white flight and the other urban harms affected things, if you have statistics available, and make it clearer when this was going on.
  • I wish I could! That section is a bit more general than I'd prefer, but I'm a bit limited by the sources. I have a bit of a catch-22 in that section. Any sources that discuss mid-century white flight in more depth would focus on general sociological forces other than the smog, while the sources that discuss the 1966 smog and white flight are very general. Any more detailed discussion would stray from the smog. White flight (and the roughly opposite trend, gentrification) are very complex topics with multiple overlapping causes; I doubt that any sociologists had studied the impact of this single smog, if such a study could even isolate the motivation of migrating populations to single causes. It may be that a source that discusses the smog and white flight exists in the academic literature somewhere, but if it does I haven't found it. Nevertheless, I thought it would be valuable to reflect the sources that indicate pollution, and this smog specifically, was likely among the many factors that motivated affluent residents to leave New York City around that time. If readers want more detailed discussion of white flight, they are going to have to turn elsewhere on Wikipedia or other sources. —BLZ · talk 21:49, 30 April 2017 (UTC)[reply]
Remainder soon.--Wehwalt (talk) 02:52, 28 April 2017 (UTC)[reply]
  • "back-up". I would just say "backup".
  • Fixed.
  • Can something be said about the actual steps taken by the city, what the laws required? This seems a bit glossed over in the discussion of the effects of the legislation.
  • The actual steps, other than increasing monitoring or setting limits on emissions/requiring different fuels, are not widely discussed in the sources I've found. I'm sure the laws themselves are highly technical and dense, and I didn't want to bog down too far into those details. It's a similar catch-22 as I faced with the "white flight" sources
  • Since we discuss interstate compacts in such detail, I'm wondering if the Sanitary Commission was one and if therefore interstate compacts should be mentioned when you introduce that body.
  • I chose to discuss interstate compacts in detail later for a few reasons:
  • 1) Interstate compacts are kinda a niche topic. They are somewhat unusual in American government, or at least unfamiliar, even to American readers, and even to American readers who are well-versed in politics, government, and the Constitution. Even if the concept of an interstate agency is intuitive and familiar, the underlying legislative procedure to create one is not.
  • 2) Explaining the failure of the Mid-Atlantic States Air Pollution Control Compact proposal requires an understanding of the (formidable) procedural requirements that it couldn't meet. The states couldn't just pass it themselves, they depended on the approval of the whole national Congress, even though it didn't affect the whole nation.
  • 3) I think that a general reader, with general knowledge and intuition, would probably be left wondering what stopped the states from just making the interstate compact that they wanted. But that doesn't apply to the earlier mention of the Sanitary Commission, since the existence of interstate agencies can be "taken for granted" by a reader. If I didn't feel bound to explain what an interstate compact was only by the nitty-gritty failure of one to pass, I would have avoided the details altogether.
  • I'm not sure the caption explains the relevance of the Graveshead Bay incinerator photo. Was it shut down? Is the trash waiting for its doom or is it there because the plant's been shut down?
  • It's not really directly connected, other than serving as a general illustration of an over-burdened incinerator from the same era. The section discusses the problems caused by interaction between environmentally motivated actions and other duties of a city. The smog did cause some specific examples of those problems, but more importantly, it prompted general thinking about those undesired interactions as a general principle of city management. I thought using an era-appropriate (but not directly historically connected) photo as an illustration would work, because it complements the sort of general, textbook-like ideas of that section. However, if you think it doesn't work I'm open to that too, I was just brainstorming other free images I could use to dress up the page a bit more.
  • " but further action was opposed by members of congress" Congress is capped. In this case, I'd cut the last two words anyway, it's clear where this debate is taking place.
  • Fixed the capitalization, but I left "members of Congress" intact. You're right that it's clear "where" it's taking place, but the phrase is really about "who". It is important to clarify the opposition was from members of Congress, not members of the public, industry representatives, or some other group that can exert influence on Congress. As for the wording: using "members" by itself is sort of awkward, and "members of Congress" rolls off the tongue even if it looks repetitive (substituting the non-gender-neutral synonym, "congressmen," also shows this).
  • I don't think it's a good idea for the first sentence of a "Legacy" section to start off with a sentence that does not mention the subject of the article. Start more strongly. Maybe start by saying the smog was recalled after 9/11 and served as a basis of comparison. Is there any chance of beginning the section with a short paragraph on the "big picture" legacy of the smog, perhaps with a quote or two? Because the items listed all seem not hugely significant.
  • I drafted a brief introductory paragraph; let me know if you think it works. "Legacy" as a word, though technically accurate, connotes something different than I wanted, it has a vibe that is too "grand". The word "legacy" is usually used for an influence that has increased over time (for example an album's "legacy" would be, quintessentially, a The Velvet Underground & Nico-esque snowballing from toiling obscurity to ubiquitous recognition of genius and clout) or come to be recognized more and more over time (an individual politician's contributions may have been misunderstood or under-estimated in their own time). The word certainly primes a reader to expect something more than a list of, I'll admit, "not hugely significant" recollections, but I don't know what other word to use. This smog's real "legacy" is what resulted immediately (deaths and politics) rather than any "significance" or "influence" that appreciated in value/increased over time, and by the end of the article I've already exhausted all the analysis and quotes about the real long-term significance. The "legacy" section is really more of a list of "when this smog does get mentioned decades later (outside of strictly historical recounting), this is how and why it has been remembered." Maybe there's a better title, something that would set up reader expectations better? I just don't know what alternate word would work.
  • " his administration's environmental policy" maybe "proposals" for "policy", especially as you use "Trump's policies" a little later.
  • Reworded.
That's all I have.--Wehwalt (talk) 17:28, 1 May 2017 (UTC)[reply]
I've edited in response to all of the above, let me know what you think. I've also added a bit more text in light of sources I had not come across until now and only found through happenstance. —BLZ · talk 02:12, 2 May 2017 (UTC)[reply]
Support Looks good enough for me. I was in Beijing last fall, hope it wasn't as bad as that. --Wehwalt (talk) 17:57, 6 May 2017 (UTC)[reply]

Comments from Moisejp

[edit]

First read-through:
Warnings:

  • "Open topography and favorable wind conditions prevented New York City's smog from concentrating to an uninhabitable extent." This sentence does not seem to flow well with what what comes before and after it, which talk about how New York's smog was a problem. In fact, the sentence seems contradictory with the whole article, which is about how for a few days New York's smog did become uninhabitable, to the point where it may have killed dozens of people.
    • I've added a few sentences to clarify what I mean. Basically, NYC polluted more than LA, but LA's pollutants concentrated while NYC's would normally escape with the wind. The air pollution didn't seem as bad as LA's because something unusual would have to happen for the smog in NYC to become dramatically visible or acutely lethal. NYC's intense episodes of smog occurred when abnormal weather prevented the usual escape of smog.

November 24: Thanksgiving Day

  • First sentence uses "close call" which sounds a little colloquial, but maybe okay. But when "close call" is repeated in footnote g, I feel the repetition pushes this to the point where one wants a more encyclopedic term. Could you replace at least the instance in the footnote?
    • I fixed this by rewording those sentences and substituting two quoted phrases from the article: "on the verge" and "very, very close"

November 25: first-stage alert declared:

  • "Thomas R. Glenn Jr., the commission's director and chief engineer, recommended the alert at 11:25 a.m. after seeing instruments in New York and New Jersey that showed carbon monoxide greater than 10 ppm and smoke greater than 7.5 ppm, both for more than four consecutive hours." I know that ppm is spelled out and wiki-linked in footnote 4, which is technically before this, but for readers who don't read the footnotes, how would you feel about also wiki-linking here?
    • I think that makes a lot of sense, fixed.

Impact:

  • The first sub-heading is "Initial estimates of health effect and casualties" and the next one is simply "Casualties". Would it be an idea to change the second sub-heading to something like "Casualties: subsequent estimates" or "Subsequent estimates of casualties" to distinguish the topic more clearly from the first section?
    • Agreed, I went with "Subsequent estimates of casualties"

National attention:

  • Third paragraph: two sentences in a row beginning with "According to".
    • Reworded.

That's all for the first read-through. The reviewers above already caught a couple of other points I was going to mention. I'll try to have a second read-through soon. Moisejp (talk) 06:49, 28 April 2017 (UTC)[reply]

Thanks for the review! I've addressed your points above and I look forward to your second run-through. —BLZ · talk 01:20, 1 May 2017 (UTC)[reply]

Second read-through:
Just a few more comments. Address these and I will support.

  • I don't have a strong opinion about this, but have you considered including conversions to Celsius throughout the article? This could make the information more understandable to English-speaking readers around the world living in countries where Fahrenheit is not used. For reference, the lead of Global warming is one place that uses such conversion templates.
  • Great idea, I've added conversions (although I did them manually).

November 24: Thanksgiving Day:

  • "Representative William Fitts Ryan of Manhattan sent a telegram to Secretary of Health and Human Services John W. Gardner requesting an emergency meeting be held with New York Governor Nelson Rockefeller, New Jersey Governor Richard J. Hughes, and other regional leaders present." It's not clear to me where the other regional leaders were "present".
  • I'm not sure what you mean. I reworded the sentence slightly, let me know if that got at what you thought was confusing.
  • That fixed my concern, great. What I had meant was that "present" implies being present in a particular place, but I couldn't figure out what specifically that place was supposed to be. Moisejp (talk) 08:31, 2 May 2017 (UTC)[reply]

Subsequent estimates of casualties:

  • "Pollution experts estimated that if a smog as strong as the Donora smog occurred in the much more populous New York City, the death toll could have been as high as 11,000 with four million ill." Should this possibly be "Pollution experts estimated that if a smog as strong as the Donora smog had occurred in the much more populous New York City, the death toll could have been as high as 11,000 with four million ill." Or "Pollution experts estimated that if a smog as strong as the Donora smog occurred in the much more populous New York City, the death toll could be as high as 11,000 with four million ill." Those would be the regular patterns of the 3rd and 2nd conditional. The first would be talking about a hypothetical past event, and the second about a hypothetical future event (in relation to the experts saying this). As it is now, it's not clear whether the hypothetical event is meant to be in the past or future.
  • I think the former is closer to the sentence structure in the source; I've reworded it to that. Or, maybe, "Pollution experts estimated that if a smog as strong as the Donora smog were to occur in the much more populous New York City, the death toll could be as high as 11,000 with four million ill."

Legacy:

  • "The New York City-based indie pop band Vampire Weekend used a photograph of the smog over the city skyline, taken by Neal Boenzi and originally published in The New York Times, for the cover of their 2013 album Modern Vampires of the City." I don't know what is best for this, but did you consider explicitly stating that this is the same photo (or not) shown in the infobox at the beginning of the article? Perceptive readers may see from the infobox's caption that this photo was also taken by Neal Boenzi, and may wonder whether it is the same one. Moisejp (talk) 03:42, 2 May 2017 (UTC)[reply]
  • I did consider this, but it seemed too obvious. I figure that if people know the album already, they will probably recognize it when they click the link; and if readers have gotten that far in the article and are interested in seeing the cover, it should click for them if they click through to the VW album article. —BLZ · talk 07:15, 2 May 2017 (UTC)[reply]

Support on prose. All of my concerns are addressed. This is a really, really nice article. Moisejp (talk) 08:31, 2 May 2017 (UTC)[reply]

Comments from The ed17

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  • Support on sourcing - looks really good overall; only random thoughts and one optional recommendation from me. Note that I haven't assessed the content. This article, written from scratch about an event that checks just about every box in our systemic bias (not a criticism!), is proof that Wikipedia is not finished.
    • Not a fan of how {{citation}} handles dates with vs without authors (why one uses parenthesis and one doesn't is beyond me). Not something in your control.
    • Bibliography does not include publisher locations, but those are marked as optional over at WP:HOWCITE.
    • Getting your hands on an original copy of Wise would be useful, as iUniverse is a self-publishing house.
    • Love the use of the subscription lock icons. Ed [talk] [majestic titan] 01:52, 30 April 2017 (UTC)[reply]
  • Thank you for your support!
    • I added the publisher locations to the bibliography section; it was a good exercise to double-check each of the references and make sure all the information was thorough and accurate. I also updated all the ISBNs to the ISBN13 standards (with the dashes!), which is preferred. I found that one of my references cited an editor as an author and that two had the wrong year (one because there was a second edition, the other probably a typo).
    • I will look into Wise. My school's online catalog says our library has a copy, so I should be able to check on that tomorrow.
    • I'm a big fan of the subscription lock icons too. I never knew they existed until midway through writing this article. I relied extensively on NY Times' archive and initially cited the old print articles without links, since most readers wouldn't be able to access the articles anyway. I updated those sources with links later when I realized the subscription lock could indicate that they were behind a paywall. —BLZ · talk 01:20, 1 May 2017 (UTC)[reply]
  • @The ed17: I was able to get my hands on the print edition of Wise; the source now reflects the first edition, and I was able to draw a little more from the book than what I had been able to find online. —BLZ · talk 02:14, 2 May 2017 (UTC)[reply]

Meteorology pedantry from JC

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Echoing the previous comments that the article appears to be in great shape overall. Anyone who knows me could have guessed that I'd be immediately drawn to the weather maps, and I did notice a few things in the meteorological narrative that could stand to be clarified.

  • An anticyclonic thermal inversion[28] — in other words, a stationary, warm mass of air – Perhaps it could be clarified that this warm mass of air is located above the ground/atop a cooler airmass.
  • Reworded.
  • Inversions can act like a lid, preventing the usual process of lower, warm air rising. Such weather events are common, and they are usually followed by a cold front that blows them away. – This seems to misrepresent the source material slightly. Cold fronts can actually help strengthen thermal inversions, so the hope would have been for the front to "blow away" the smog near the ground instead of the inversion itself.
  • Ah, I misunderstood the source originally. Let me know if the new wording makes sense.
  • Surface weather analysis maps showing wind at a height of 18,000 feet – Surface weather maps show the weather at the surface; data from above the ground, as in these illustrations, are plotted on an upper air map/chart. It might also be worth clarifying that the height level is "approximately" 18,000 feet, since the geopotential height is dynamic and can vary by thousands of feet across a continent.
  • Reworded.
  • Shortly after 9 a.m. the wind arrived, moving mostly from the northeast between 5–6 miles per hour and bringing cooler temperatures in the 50s °F (10–15 °C). – A few questions: first, cooler relative to what? In looking at the daily records for KJFK, the temperature had not reached 60°F since November 11. Second, it might be worth noting that winds increased to a more formidable 15 mph sustained by midday (source). Finally, I can't access the cited NYT article, but in a cold front passage the winds wouldn't be mainly out of the northeast; they'd shift from southwesterly to northwestern (which is what the actual wind observations from JFK generally show).
  • This is the passage that I relied on from the NYT source (this paragraph begins on the second page of the story under the subheading "Winds Fairly Gentle," for anyone with access who would want to check):
  • "Actually, the wind that cleared out the smog never became too strong, and the temperature did not fall too much. The wind, mostly from the northeast, varied between 6 and 10 miles and hour, as compared with the sluggish atmosphere of Friday that was sometimes a dead calm. The temperature was generally in the fifties, whereas on Friday it had reached 64, a record for the date."
  • To answer your questions in turn: "cooler" means cooler relative to the claimed record high of 64 on that Friday, the 25th. The NYT doesn't precisely attribute the statement above, but I would presume that it was the city's health/pollution officials since they are the prevailing source for this article and others about the smog. I requested NOAA climate records for New York City from November 1–30, and most of the recording stations put it in about the same ranges, even if the "cooler" difference may be a matter of only a few degrees: most recording stations put the high for the 25th somewhere above 62, and most stations put the high for the 26th at or below 59. I corrected the wind speed based on the source to 5–10 mph rather than 5–6 mph (typo on my part). Finally, though it may be strange, the NYT reported that the wind was "mostly from the northeast".
  • Just as a suggestion – feel free to disregard – it may be helpful to include a chart like this (probably qualifies under {{PD-ineligible}}) which shows the inversion conditions in the northeast. That particular graph is for Albany as I can only find raw data for NYC, but it would look quite similar. – Juliancolton | Talk 16:35, 12 May 2017 (UTC)[reply]
  • That link doesn't work right now, so I don't know what kind of chart it is or what data it shows :(. I'd love to include more weather data, but I'm woefully under-qualified to determine what data (and data visualizations) would actually be useful. Can the NOAA data I requested above be used?
  • @Juliancolton: Your review is very appreciated. Meteoreology pedantry is just what the doctor ordered. It was the subject matter I felt the most shaky about while writing this article. I'd considered going to Wikipedia:WikiProject Tropical cyclones for assistance since I knew hurricanes were pretty well represented at FA, but never got around to it; by some luck, a hurricane contributor ended up helping me anyway. Thank you! Let me know if you have any further questions, and I'd be happy to incorporate more weather data or images if there's some data set in particular that you think I can use or adapt. —BLZ · talk 02:27, 18 May 2017 (UTC)[reply]

Coord notes

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I think we still need a couple of checks:

  • Firstly, an image review.
  • Secondly, given it looks like it's been several years since your last FAC, Brandt, I'd like to see a spotcheck of sources for accurate use and avoidance of close paraphrasing.

You can post requests for both at the top of WT:FAC. Cheers, Ian Rose (talk) 08:31, 14 May 2017 (UTC)[reply]

Appear to be quite a few duplinks in the article; I won't hold up promotion over them but pls check and rationalise as appropriate (you can use this script to highlight the duplicates in red). Cheers, Ian Rose (talk) 07:32, 18 June 2017 (UTC)[reply]

Source spotcheck

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I'll do a source spotcheck. Just give me a day or two, thanks. Moisejp (talk) 17:06, 14 May 2017 (UTC)[reply]

I've looked at two random sources so far. The second one seems probably mostly good, and I will wait until my next time at the keyboard to comment on it. But I have some concerns with the first source I spotchecked, which is Goklany 1999, p. 24 (available on Google Books)—ref #8. Some of the statements seem mostly OK, but I have larger concerns with other ones.

  • "Smog is the name of a type of air pollution commonly found in urban and industrialized areas." If one removes "urban", I think this is pretty much encompassed in the following statement from the source, and should be OK: "In the early 1940s, Los Angeles began experiencing a new kind of smog quite unlike the traditional smoke problem experienced elsewhere in the industrialized world."
  • Supplemented by Wise 176 to reinforce that smog is common to urban areas. This was implied but not stated directly in Goklany 24, so good catch.
  • "b. Smog is the product of "secondary" pollutants (ozone, oxidants) that form when hydrocarbons and nitrogen oxides react together in sunlight." / "A combination of several distinct chemical pollutants,[b] smog arrived in modern cities in the 1940s and 1950s with the popularization of motor vehicles and development of new power plants." Here the source discusses these things in terms of experts accepting them to be true about the smog in Los Angeles in the 1950s. I just looked at the source quickly, but I'm not sure that the source supports that these facts are globally true of all cases of smog.
  • "Although smog is a chronic condition, unfavorable weather conditions and excessive pollutants can cause intense concentrations of smog that can cause acute illness and death; because of their unusual visibility and lethality, these intense smog events are often publicized in the media and are typically described as disasters." This is all there at the bottom of page 24, except for the concept of disaster, which in good faith I will assume is in one or more of the other three sources cited together with this one.
  • Two of the other sources, Freeman and Fensterstock & Fankhauser, reinforce the concept of intense smog episodes resulting in heightened publicity. Although I don't have a copy of the Wise book with me at the moment and I don't believe the earlier pages are available online, I know that that the concept of these smogs "as disasters" is contained in those pages and that I relied on it for that idea. The title of the book itself is Killer Smog: The World's Worst Air Pollution Disaster. I've split where the references appear in the sentence so that it is more clear which sources are used for which ideas. I've also added Popkin p. 27, which is available online, for additional support for the notion that these episodes were/are commonly understood as disasters. Popkin p. 27 twice uses the word "disaster," once to refer to the 1948 Donora smog ("This episode was recognized immediately as a disaster") and once for the 1953 NYC smog ("... less than six weeks before the disaster").
  • "Even before the 1966 smog episode in New York City, it was known by scientists, city officials, and the public that the city—and most major American cities—had a serious air-pollution problem." Unfortunately, I'm really not sure what on page 24 is meant to support this statement.
  • The other two sources are more significant here.
  • Wise gives an overview of smog in America and lists several American cities that had been known to have pervasive air pollution problems (including NYC); the sentences that follow contain this evidence, and more quotes backing up this idea are cited from the same pages in the "Warnings" subsection. This primarily supports the awareness among scientists. I believe Wise also refers to city officials, but I've added a source from NYT that reinforces that idea (the fact that this section is followed by an entire section on the monitoring system developed by the city should also suffice to support that idea). I believe, but am not certain at the moment, that some of the text in Wise would support the idea of awareness among the general public.
  • The Life editorial (accessible via Google Books) summarizes the state of scientific knowledge about the dangers and extent of air and water pollution in the United States, including in New York City, and urges public action to address the problem. I take the publication of an editorial in Life, a magazine with a weekly circulation of millions of copies and a general readership (i.e. nonspecialized, intended to be read by a general audience), as constructive evidence that there was pre-existing awareness of the problem among "the general public". The fact that there were laws on the books about pollution also supports some pre-existing awareness among the public. Journalistic publications and political bodies are quintessential "public institutions".
  • The Goklany source here mainly works as backup for two already-supported ideas: that scientists were aware of the problem of smog, and that the public had some awareness of it as well. I thought the source was useful for support because it describes the genesis of scientific study of the newer photochemical smog in American cities, which began in LA. Not only does it state that there is scientific awareness, but it traces a meaningful starting point for a phase of deeper scientific study of the topic. This sentence on that page (indirectly) supports the idea of public awareness: "Third, a series of air pollution episodes occurred in which excess deaths and sicknesses were noted and covered almost immediately by newspapers."
  • I found text on page 25 of Goklany that more explicitly supports the notion of pre-existing public awareness, a paragraph which ends with "... increasing affluence made the general public more desirous of a better quality of life and less tolerant of pollution". I peeked at Goklany's source, a book called Beauty, Health, and Permanence: Environmental Politics in the United States, 1955-1985 by Samuel P Hays, through Amazon. Hays, on the pages cited by Goklany, describes a trend of increasing environmental awareness/intolerance of pollution from the 19th century into the early 20th century, which the author notes rose concurrently with the transition to a "consumer" economy. Hays does not connect that general awareness/economic trend to the specific problem of air pollution... But Goklany does. He uses it to explain why smog episodes were being noticed with increasing frequency, which strongly supports the ideas of public and scientific awareness. I've now amended the citation to include 24–25 and the quotes I relied on.

BLZ, please let me know if I have possibly missed context or other passages in the text in my spotchecking of this page. Moisejp (talk) 06:44, 18 May 2017 (UTC)[reply]

I've responded above and made some changes. The last change I'm going to make is to the definition of smog: you're right that the definition of "smog" offered is slightly misleading because it's a little too narrow. What I describe there is "photochemical smog," a type of smog that is usually just called "smog," which (as you noted) is quintessentially an LA-style smog. The word "smog" is also used to refer to a "smokier" smog, or London-style smog. The New York smog was a little bit of both in terms of the composition of the chemical pollutants at work, so I think defining the scope of the term warrants a slightly more thorough treatment than I've given so far. I've already rounded up a few sources that I think are helpful to unpack what "smog" means for the purposes of this article, without going overboard and doing some of the work that might be better suited for the main Smog article. I'll draft that bit later today, and also respond to your second spotcheck below —BLZ · talk 20:30, 22 May 2017 (UTC)[reply]

The second source I've spotchecked is ref #28—Anderson 1999, p. 472. There is just part of a paragraph at the bottom of the page about the 1966 New York smog, and the first, third, and fourth statements for ref #28 are all clearly stated in the source, but I couldn't find info about the second statement. The next page (473) is not available to me in Google Books, but I wonder whether the second statement may be covered later in the paragraph (i.e., on page 473)? Moisejp (talk) 05:50, 20 May 2017 (UTC)[reply]

Hi, BLZ. I've read your comments above and will try to dive back into your sources in the next few days to check the changes/explanations you made. I had been planning to wait until you finished responding to the second spotcheck, but depending on timing I may just go ahead and start it. Cheers, Moisejp (talk) 11:57, 25 May 2017 (UTC)[reply]

Update about my spotcheck of Goklany 1999, p. 24 (spotchecked source #1): I've looked over BLZ's explanations and changes, and where accessible, supporting sources for that section, and I am satisfied that the text related to this source is now problem-free. To be prudent (because the spotcheck for this source initially didn't obtain perfect results), today I additionally spotchecked refs 16–18 (McCarroll 1967) and 30, 32–34 (Fensterstock & Fankhauser 1968). For the most part, it all looks good. The only concern I have, BLZ, is for ref #17, regarding the statement "There was a smog event in November 1962, but Greenburg's studies found it had not resulted in significant excess deaths." It's true that it says (in the first column on page 205), "The episode has also been described by Dr. Greenburg who concluded that no effect on mortality could be demonstrated assuming a three-day lag from the onset of the air pollution episode." But a little later it discusses the spike in deaths on December 1 and says, "The peak in mortality on December 1 occurs also simultaneously with the peak in pollution." The graph on page 204 shows December 1 having about 50 deaths above the average, and December 1 appears to be the tail end of the November 1962 smog event. The text is dense and I'm not sure I have caught all relevant details, but is it definitely true that "Greenburg's studies found [the November 1962 smog event] had not resulted in significant excess deaths"? Moisejp (talk) 11:42, 28 May 2017 (UTC)[reply]

It doesn't look like Brandt has edited this nom or the article itself for a couple of weeks -- Moisejp am I right in understanding that apart from the point immediately above you're quite satisfied with the spotchecking over all? Cheers, Ian Rose (talk) 07:52, 11 June 2017 (UTC)[reply]

Image review

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  • File:1966 NYC smog by Neal Boenzi NYT.jpg: NFCR seems fine, as is use. Wondering whether there are any images of that smog that are freely licensed. Is there a reason why "cloud" does not appear in the search function of the source that backs up the second part of the caption?
  • I went searching in vain for a free 1966 smog image, but I don't believe (to the best of my combing through flickr and various public domain archives) that any exist. In fact, that same copyrighted NYT image used to be on Commons because a user at Flickr is falsely claiming it as their own free image, and I requested that it be deleted. The reason that the search function couldn't find it is because that link was using EPA's very wonky and antiquated document reader, which requires that you go to a new URL every time you turn to a new page of a PDF. Therefore, I linked to the first page of the sourced article (page 27), even though the source for that particular information was on page 28. I recently discovered how to actually access the PDF files themselves, but hadn't yet fixed it so the URL for that source pointed to the PDF; I have now done so. You should be able to find the caption that I used for that quote in the caption at the top-right hand corner of page 28, and the caption refers to their reprint of the image on page 29.
@The ed17: @Jo-Jo Eumerus: I agree with The ed17; if a sufficient free image were found, I would still argue for the inclusion of the NYT image (but not in the infobox, it would have to appear later in the piece, probably within the timeline section on the corresponding day). I'm pretty familiar with the fair use doctrine as applied on Wikipedia and I wanted to really establish that this particular image has more value than "merely" illustrating the smog in the absence of free options. For that purpose alone it would be, at least theoretically, replaceable if a free image turns up. But whether that happens or not, I wanted to include the kind of substantive, third-party commentary that would generally support the importance of a copyrighted photo as a unique historic photo in its own right. Even independent of our circumstantial reliance on it as one of the few available images to show the smog, this photo has some independent notability. I'm glad that The ed17 picked up on that in the caption and article. All that said, I don't think there's a strong chance of a free image (much less a high-quality one) turning up out of the blue anyway, so this is all a bit speculative. —BLZ · talk 20:48, 22 May 2017 (UTC)[reply]
  • Not enough for an article, no, but quoting from NFC: "Two of the most common circumstances in which an item of non-free content can meet the contextual significance criterion are: ... where the item is itself the subject of sourced commentary in the article ..." :-) Ed [talk] [majestic titan] 03:53, 23 May 2017 (UTC)[reply]
  • The source of the caption is also the exact source of the maps (which I arranged into a grid and labeled myself) and their corresponding captions that describe their contents.
  • You're the second person to comment on this image seeming slightly non-germane. I have no strong feeling about including it. I included it in the first placebecause it illustrates the general problem of trash management in NYC and is from roughly the same era; I wouldn't defend it as specifically related to "environmental problems + trash problems" (it's just illustrating trash problems) or tightly contemporaneous (it is years apart from the 1966 smog). If you think it should go, I'm happy to take this one out.
  • Source should be fixed for this one as well.
  • File:Rockefeller and Johnson.jpg: Use of image seems fine. Regarding the caption, I am not sure if the "became a major policy objective" text in the caption gels with the "already a priority" of the article. Source link broken.
  • I didn't upload this image or the image below; is retrieval of those links (through archive.org or other means) necessary to complete the image review?'
  • Regarding the caption and the article body: I wrote "already a priority" because it had been something Johnson had spoken about several times, and it would be misleading to suggest that his post-1966 statements and actions on air pollution were a completely newfound revelation on the issue. That said, with the wind of Congress behind him he was certainly newly empowered to act, and so it "became a major policy objective" at that time. It would be like if Obama had been able to sign major gun-control legislation after his fifth or so speech commemorating victims of a massacre and calling for increased gun control; in that fantasy world, it would be misleading to represent that Obama had never or hardly seen gun control as a priority (since he would have already talked about it five or so times by then), but it would also be accurate to say that (while it had "already" been a priority) it still became a "major" priority after the massacre. I could tweak the wording from "became a major policy objective" to "more pressing" or "more urgent policy objective," if you think that one of those or another alternate would express the idea better.
  • Same question as above on broken source link.

None of the images is currently using ALT text seems like. Some captions sourced to offline sources. Jo-Jo Eumerus (talk, contributions) 19:10, 17 May 2017 (UTC)[reply]

  • I figured out what was wrong with the broken links. The photo gallery page is a searchable database, but each individual photo doesn't have (at least, doesn't seem to have so far as I can tell) a unique permalink of its own. What I've done is find those photos within the gallery and then include their unique serial numbers with the link in the source. Someone trying to access the photos just has to copy-paste the serial number to find it. —BLZ · talk 04:04, 20 May 2017 (UTC)[reply]
  • @Jo-Jo Eumerus: I've now added alt captions for each image. —BLZ · talk 05:02, 21 May 2017 (UTC)[reply]
    Alright, seems like source links and ALTs check out now. Jo-Jo Eumerus (talk, contributions) 08:10, 21 May 2017 (UTC)[reply]
The above discussion is preserved as an archive. Please do not modify it. No further edits should be made to this page.
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