Shortly before Christmas in 1969 a dense fog rolled in across the bayous of the Texas Gulf Coast. For more than four days it blanketed a vast region, as far west as San Antonio and as far east as Port Arthur. Flights were grounded, cars crashed, and all traffic halted in the Houston Ship Channel, one of the busiest ports in the world. The murk posed a real threat to Texans with emphysema or asthma, to the elderly or the infirm. “These people are going to suffer more acutely,” a local physician told the Houston Post. Indeed, one Houston hospital reported a 240 percent surge in patients with breathing issues; a health officer noted a “tremendous increase” in upper respiratory symptoms.
To many Texans the source of the haze was, ironically, clear. It was “pollution-fed fog,” as the Post put it in a front-page headline, a glaring manifestation of a problem that plagued the industrialized parts of the region. So contaminated was the air that water droplets could cling to pollutants, slowing evaporation; the resulting scrim of moisture inhibited vertical air movement, trapping more pollution in turn.
At the moment the fog descended, Texans were rising up against environmental degradation like never before. Just days earlier State Representative Rex Braun, an intense, ruddy-faced man, warned an Arlington audience about the long-term effects of living with pollution. If the state couldn’t reduce it, he told the crowd, “you will drown in your own sewage, be buried in your own garbage or choked to death on your own bad air.”
Braun and a coalition of environmentally minded supporters pressed their case at a city council hearing soon after the haze cleared. A mother carrying an eleven-month-old baby in a yellow dress followed Braun at the podium; the child’s name was Tracy Lynn, a spokesman told the councilmembers, and her asthma was so severe that during the days of fog the doctors weren’t sure if she would make it. They advised the family to leave Houston; the air was too bad. Two days after the hearing a class of junior high school students unrolled a fifty-foot-long petition down the middle aisle of the city council chamber in nearby Baytown. “We, the undersigned, deserve the right to breathe clean air,” it declared, above some two thousand signatures. Under pressure, the Houston city council agreed to stop rubber-stamping grace periods for local industries to comply with air pollution regulations, a move that several councilmen described as “drastic.”