(Beijing ) - The municipal government in Beijing issued the first ever red alert over air pollution on December 7.
The alert, the highest possible warning level, is raised when the air quality index surges above the 200 mark and the Beijing Municipal Bureau for Environmental Protection forecasts the heavy pollution would last for last more than 72 hours.
Schools have been told to suspend classes and all urban construction projects have ground to a halt. Factories have had to shut down or cut production．The local government has also ordered thirty percent of all official vehicles to be taken off the streets. Private vehicles have been restricted and cars with odd or even number plates are allowed on the roads on alternate days.
It is the first time Beijing has declared a red alert under the country's four-tier alert system, which was put in place nine months ago, although pollution levels were far from the city's worst.
Municipal authorities were criticized for being too slow to respond when Beijing was cloaked in smog for five days at the end of November. It was the worst ever smog to hit the northern municipalities of Beijing and Tianjin and a number of cities in neighboring Hebei Province, environmental experts said.
False Alerts
During this previous bout of smog from November 27 to December 1, levels of PM2.5, a measure of tiny airborne particulates linked to lung cancer, soared to 300 micrograms per cubic meter. But PM2.5 readings in parts of southern Beijing surged to 935 micrograms per cubic meter at times, statistics from the Beijing Municipal Environment Monitoring Center showed. The World Health Organization recommends 25 micrograms per cubic meter as the maximum safe level.
China's alert system on air pollution gives more weight to forecasts on how long the air pollution is will last, and not how severe pollution is at any given time, experts said.
Therefore, the Beijing city government first issued a yellow alert on November 27, an indication the pollution would last for less than 48 hours. But when the gray pall choking the city didn't lift after two day, authorities updated it to an orange alert, a sign that the bad air would only last for less than 72 hours.
Social media platforms were buzzing with criticism over the government's failure to raise a red alert, given the foul air lasted for almost five days.
Shortcomings in smog forecast techniques caused the miscalculation, Wang Bin, head of a division in-charge of pollution linked emergencies at the Beijing Municipal Bureau for Environmental Protection, which is responsible for raising these alarms, said. At first, a yellow alert was issued when the bureau forecasted the gray pall would last for less than 48 hours, Wang said, then it worsened, triggering an orange alert, but authorities hesitated to issue the highest warning because forecasters said the pollution would not for 72 hours.
The government should start developing a more responsive alert system, which takes into account real-time readings of pollution levels as well as how long the bad air conditions would last, analysts said. A more flexible alert system, where a red alert can be raised as soon as pollution levels hit a certain threshold, would send a clearer signal to the public, they added.
Three years ago, the central government launched a campaign to tackle air pollution by pushing hundreds of polluting factories such as steel mills and heavy machinery manufacturers out of Beijing to rural areas or cities in neighboring Hebei Province. Burning coal to heat homes and offices in winter in Northern China has been blamed for smog. But, the number of vehicles in Beijing has grown to over 5.6 million and vehicle emissions have become a bigger cause of pollution by increasing the levels of hazardous Nitrogen Oxide, according to a research by the Chinese Research Academy of Environmental Sciences, the Ministry of Environmental Protection said. Vehicle emissions was the source of one-third of the pollutants in the air, but when weather conditions deteriorated, this could rise to about 40 percent, the study showed.
A lack of accountability in environmental oversight is to blame for air pollution, said Liu Changgen, head of a Ministry of Environmental Protection unit conducting pollution inspections in northern China. A team of inspectors found that many construction sites had not stopped work during a round of spot checks when Beijing was smothered in smog in late November, Liu said, and site managers said they had not received any orders to suspend work. Factories in Tianjin and in several cities in Hebei and Henan provinces failed to follow government orders to stop production after air pollution reached hazardous levels. "The underlying problem is that few people have been held to account for these violations," he said.
Deadly Particles
Residents in several northeastern provinces were choked by foul air in mid-November. Hazardous PM2.5 levels in some parts of Shenyang, capital of the northeastern province of Liaoning soared to 1,400 micrograms per cubic meter, setting a record for the worst level of pollution seen anywhere in China.
Hospitals in northeastern provinces saw a spike in the number of patients with respiratory ailments during this period, said Zhu Yifang, director of the Center for Clean Air at the University of California in Los Angeles, and exposure to smog has a long-term negative impact on health.
When PM2.5 density in the air goes over 1,000 millimeters per cubic meter, pollution has reached levels seen during the Great Smog of 1952 in London, she said.
About 12,000 people died in one of the worst pollution related calamities, when the British capital was cloaked in a toxic mix of dense fog and sooty black coal smoke for five days in the winter of 1952.
But the hazardous air in China has not led to mass deaths because particulates in smog in China are different from pollutants found during the London smoke and because public health facilities have improved, Zhu said.
Smog in Beijing, Tianjin and cities in neighboring Hebei Province contain PM2.5 particles linked to lung cancer, said Professor Pan Xiaochuan from Peking University's School of Public Health, and dust and sulfur dioxide led to the smoke in London causing death due to respiratory failure.
"The harm from the London smoke was instant, but we need more time and resources to look into the impact of PM2.5-laced smog on public health," Pan said.
The tiny particulate matter, PM 2.5, can enter the blood stream and then get deposited in the pulmonary alveoli, the tiny balloon-like structures in the lungs that help absorb oxygen, leading to respiratory ailments, heart failure and even premature death.
The number of deaths spiked year-on-year to more than 2,700 in12 major cities in northern China from January 10 to 31 in 2013, when PM 2.5 levels soared to over 700 micrograms per cubic meter, according to a study conducted by the Chinese Academy for Environmental Planning (CAEP) that same year.
One in three of deaths were linked to respiratory illness, while heart failure and other problems connected to the cardiovascular system caused two-thirds of the deaths, Dr. Zhang Yanshen from CEAP, who lead the research team, said.
More than 1,300 people living in the three metropolises Beijing, Shanghai and Guangzhou and the northwestern city of Xian have died prematurely due to exposure to high levels of pollution in 2013, a recent joint study by CAEP and Chinese Center for Disease Control found. But, academics say statistics are limited, and more studies should be done to look into the long-term impact of smog on public health.
(Rewritten by Li Rongde)
(Source:Caixin Online)
