Schools closed and rush-hour roads were much quieter than normal as Beijing invoked its first-ever red alert for smog yesterday. “But health is the most important for children, right?”
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Beijing office worker Cao Yong said during a break from work told the AP that the poor quality of the air was “modern life for Beijing people”, adding, “we wanted to develop, and now we pay the price”.
“We were just informed the primary school will be shut for three days”, said Li Xia, 35, who has an eight-year-old daughter. The other alerts-blue, yellow and orange-are milder warnings but still issued on “heavy pollution” days. Other governmental departments have also been under criticism for offering contradicting accounts on what caused the smog.
Baoding, a city 150 kilometres from Beijing, will also implement an odd/even restriction on auto use from Tuesday.
“I feel like I’m engaged in chemical warfare”, one commuter said on social media.
The local environmental protection bureau said they had to immediately issue a red alert in the city to warn people about the risky effects of the gray smog in the city.
“This week in Paris, China is rightfully getting credit for its policies to tackle climate change”, Alex Wang, a law professor at the University of California, Los Angeles, who studies Chinese environmental policy, said in the New York Times article.
“Some people think this is ridiculous to vacuum dust in the air”, says Brother Nut, “Air pollution is a problem for everyone”.
Mandatory emergency measures and recommended emergency measures will be included in measures for the alert.
Well, I have survived Beijing’s first ever pollution “red alert” day, and frankly, after several years of inhaling noxious smog, I am wondering what all the fuss is about. Beijing authorities said at the time that the initial forecasts were for less time so no alert was called for, but critics maintained they were seeking to avoid the toughest restrictions for political reasons. The government cleaned the air in advance by suspending or restricting the operations of 12,255 coal-burning boilers, factories and cement-mixing stations scattered among seven provinces.
It is the second time this month that notoriously polluted Beijing has experienced a prolonged bout of smog, sending PM2.5 levels in the suburbs as high as 976 micrograms. However, he stressed that long-term measures to improve air quality – such as capping coal consumption – are critical to cleaning up China’s atmosphere. Experts said the same situation might stretch entire week. “There isn’t such a thing as a pollution holiday for us”.
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“We will have to figure out how to move industry out, and how to disperse the population, or we will be paying back a debt taken out…by our own mistakes”.
