1 of 1- Goose
- Cogito ergo sum
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- Registered: 1/29/2015
- Posts: 13,427
A Country Free of those Job-Killing Regulations
This is why we have a Clean Air Act, and an EPA
Smog Chokes Delhi, Leaving Residents
‘Cowering by Our Air Purifiers’
Levels of the most dangerous particles soared over the weekend in some
places to more than 16 times the limit India’s government considers safe.
NEW DELHI — For days, many in Delhi have been living as if under siege, trying to keep the dirty air away from their children and older parents.
But it is not easy: Open a window or a door, and the haze enters the room within seconds. Outside, the sky is white, the sun a white circle so pale that you can barely make it out. The smog is acrid, eye-stinging and throat-burning, and so thick that it is being blamed for a 70-vehicle pileup north of the city.
If in past years Delhi’s roughly 20 million residents shrugged off wintertime pollution as fog, over the past week they viewed it as a crisis. Schools have been ordered closed for three days — an unprecedented measure, but not a reassuring one because experts say the concentration of pollutants inside Indian homes is typically not much lower than outside.
Levels of the most dangerous particles, called PM 2.5, reached 700 micrograms per cubic meter on Monday, and over the weekend they soared in some places to 1,000, or more than 16 times the limit India’s government considers safe. The damage from sustained exposure to such high concentrations of PM 2.5 is equivalent to smoking more than two packs of cigarettes a day, experts say.
“There is so much smog outside that today, inside my house, I felt as though someone had just burned a few sheets of paper,” said Amaan Ahuja, one of dozens who shared their families’ experiences in response to a request from The New York Times.
“You can literally see smoke in the air, and when you breathe, you can smell it, too,” he said. “We are trying to keep the kids indoors with all the windows closed.”
Another reader, Tulika Seth, described her family’s life over the past week as “unnatural and disturbing.”
Asked where she lived, she responded, “a gas chamber.”
We live in a time in which decent and otherwise sensible people are surrendering too easily to the hectoring of morons or extremists.