Oct 28 Pollution days

Right now - 10PM Beijing time - this is the reading. As it happens, the government controls when the heat goes on in different cities. For example, in Harbin last week the world heard about their pollution which was over 1000 at some times, with visibility so low that you couldn't see the car in front of or behind you even with their lights on. Of course building shapes didn't exist. I guess their heat went on last week and all the furnaces revving up with coal fired furnaces caused a huge bulge in pollution. Unfortunately the big day for Beijing in Friday Nov 1 so I am expecting to see even more of a surge here then. (and I was just planning for a really nice weekend :~(( Winter is apparently really bad because all houses and cook stoves in the rural areas w of here (along with all the heavy industry) are coal fired and apparently it's a pretty dirty form of coal. But it is abundant and it will be used. Today was my first day with a mask, and I have to say that the sense of pressure on my chest was indeed diminished by the filtered air. I suspect I will wear it all the time for a while.

At school if the pollution level is above 150, there is indoor recess, and if it is below that after several indoor recess days, then the kids go out for 2 recesses - which of course wreaks havoc with lesson planning. A planning problem for the school is knowing how many families will move out of China because of the pollution. With the government being in Beijing, you'd think this problem would have been a higher priority some time ago, but growth and development, no matter what the cost, took precidence.

I took a few image shots of the pollution levels in major US cities today just for comparison. Remember when we used to descend through a sickly brown haze into LA. Well, at least for today that is changed.

 

This AQI (air quality index) is for Los Angeles

Here is today's call for Long Beach CA - supposedly one of the worst cities for air quality in the US

And here is all of New York State - looking good!

I may pray for wind, but most people don't. For one, there is an inordinate fear of any sort of chill. Cold is out of the question. Being from Boston, I can understand a really cold "Alberta Clipper" wind. It can be damn cold, but I've never hated/feared it the way people here seem to talk about it. Chill is not something in the culture anyway, all the food is cooked - or nearly so and there is a lot of talk about foods that are warming. (There is so much cultural information around me that I really can't absorb it all in such a short time - so I continue to eat my raw/cold salads.)

A more ferocious reason for hating the wind is that especially in the spring it blows in the desert sands from Mongolia. Desertification is a huge problem. In Dunhuang, a beautiful city we visited in the West, you can climb up a dune and look back at the edges of the city being eaten up by desert. This particular desert, the Taklamakan, is hundreds of sq miles of moving dunes. These are world class dunes of 1500-2000 feet high. I've been told that there is no stopping the railroad through here and on its way to Tibet, nor the airport on the edge of the desert. Sweepers will be employed. The sand will not stand in the way!

While I am getting more sucked in to the life here in Beijing - so many layers of feeling, information, culture..., but I do look forward to a rural mountain village in Nepal or somewhere in the Himalyas. (I did want to go to Tibet and see Mt Everest from there and from India, but I couldn't get it organized in time.) The idea of really getting to know individuals on a daily basis - in clean air - is appealing - even if we have to cook food and boil water together before doing anything else. What is it about the mountains that draws me so? Given the Viking heritage, it should be the sea, but I guess I got other genes.

 

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