Pollution Chokes Mexico City Residents
Mexico City’s worst smog crisis in three years left thousands of residents wheezing and coughing. Concerned doctors and ecologists said Tuesday it was a warning to the government that firmer action was needed to curb the city’s chronic air quality problems.
Thousands of protesters, including children wearing Halloweenstyle death masks, rallied against the government’s handling of the pollution emergency.
Demonstration leaders Tuesday accused the government of playing down the level of air pollution and its effects on the 20 million residents of the Mexico Valley.
About 3,000 people, many of them members of Mexico’s Green Environmentalist Party, formed a human chain around the capital’s central plaza, known as the Zocalo.
They called on the government to release figures on the number of people killed or hospitalized during a three-day environmental emergency that ended Monday.
“We know that people are dying, but they won’t tell us how many died during the emergency,” said party president Jorge Gonzalez.
Winds blew away some of the brown-gray haze on Tuesday, ending the smog emergency that city officials and environmentalists said was the most dangerous since 1992.
City officials said the length of the so-called “Phase I” pollution alert - even more than its severity - was reason for concern.
“What’s worse now than before is that we have more days of high levels,” said Sergio Alonso, who runs the city’s pollution monitoring system. He said past alerts lasted no more than a day or two.
For most of January, pollution levels have hovered between 150 and 200 on the Metropolitan Air Quality Index known as the Imeca scale.
Under the system - considered a less stringent measure of pollution than the World Health Organization’s standard - a reading of 150 on the Imeca scale is deemed “unsatisfactory” while anything above 200 is “dangerous.”
On Friday, ozone levels rose to an alarming 269 on the scale and the government lurched into action, calling for Phase I emergency measures.
Under the program that lasted through Monday, more than one million people were told to leave their cars at home.
Industrial activity was cut by 30 percent as factories were ordered to shut down, and 20 percent of the city’s gas stations were closed.
Residents were advised to stay indoors and avoid outdoor exercise, and children were kept in classrooms during lunch and recess.
Studies by U.N. agencies have judged Mexico City as having one of the worst air quality records in the world. The brown cloud that normally hangs over the Mexican capital contains car and industrial exhaust, unburned cooking fuel and fecal matter.