Qiyam Ansari, of West Mifflin, stands for a portrait in front of the billowing stacks of U.S. Steel’s Clairton Coke Works on Feb. 27, 2024.(Photo by Stephanie Strasburg/PublicSource)
High school was phenomenal until an air inversion nearly killed me. Then a voice told me: “Don’t worry, I’ll show you why.”
First-person essay by Qiyam Ansari, For PublicSource
I first heard of Pittsburgh in 2010 when my mother told us we were moving there.
I looked it up on Google and saw it was a 13-hour trip with six people from our home in New Haven, Connecticut. All of 14 years old at the time, I thought: This will be rough.
When I went on Google to search for Pittsburgh, all I saw was the steel industry and the Steelers. On the way there, I remember seeing all the farms in Pennsylvania for the first time, and I thought we were moving to the country. I was so happy when I started seeing houses again.
As I got to know the area, I was in complete awe of how massive the old mills were and how many train lines crisscrossed the neighborhoods. When I first went Downtown, I thought Pittsburgh was the most beautiful city I had ever seen. The bridges, the water, the mountains, and the valleys inspired me.
Until the morning of the air inversion that completely redirected my life.
We lived in East McKeesport, and I enrolled at Propel Braddock Hills High School. I wasn’t aware of U.S. Steel until John Fetterman, then the mayor of Braddock, had a community project in Braddock during high school. I later learned that they were responsible for the rotten egg smell that would often cause kids on my bus to say, “Who farted,” every time we drove by the mill on our way home.
During my time there, I was a reasonably productive kid; I was an honor roll student, acted in a musical, was captain of my Ultimate Frisbee team, was a peer mediator, did Americorps, won prom king and tried my best to be a productive member of society.
I did all that despite asthma, which was well-managed until my junior year.
Fright Night prep became a real nightmare.
A week before Kennywood opened for Fright Night, I woke up to a typical fall day until my mom suddenly announced we were moving again, a few miles away to McKeesport.
Moving was unexpected news for me at 7 a.m. I started packing the house because we only had one day to prepare. I ran to my room and began to pack as any frantic teenage boy would; I threw everything into black trash bags and random boxes without labeling. As the day drew on, a temperature inversion brought a classic Pittsburgh mix of rain, hail and snow, all within 12 hours.
As I learned later, this inversion trapped polluted air close to the ground and created a potentially deadly environment, which I felt with labored breathing as my airways began to constrict.
Being a prideful idiot, I did not mention these symptoms to my mother, who only noticed when I could no longer hold in my strained coughs and wheezing. Being a very active kid, I had confidence in pushing my body. I had played entire games of Ultimate Frisbee without inhalers, so I thought I knew my limits. What I did not consider was that the toxic particles were so highly concentrated in the air that they were killing me and intensifying the asthma attack.
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