NOTE: Pollution in Mexico is an extreme example of the atmospheric pollution that now afflicts even the most remote regions of the earth.
05/29/98
In Mexico City, poisonous air and choking smoke from forest fires is costing Mexico millions of dollars a day in lost industrial production and extra health costs, the government’s environmental health chief said Friday.
Mexico City declared a fourth consecutive day of smog emergency Friday as a coffee-colored haze smothered the skyline despite the year’s first heavy rains late Thursday.
Emergency measures cutting the number of cars on the roads and slashing factory output meant lost sales and man hours of at least $8 million a day, said Gustavo Olaiz Fernandez, Director General of Environmental Health.
In addition, the costs of dealing with a sharp increase in health complaints during smog emergencies involved up to another $3.5 million a day in Mexico City alone.
"This is a very significant amount of money", Olaiz told Reuters in an interview in his office, framed by a view of the dangerous air pollution just outside his window.
Perched at 7,000 feet in a mountain valley where the air is thin and fumes get trapped, Mexico City is renowned for suffering air pollution.
Under the contingency measures, half the city’s three million cars had to be pulled from the roads, its 60,000 factories were urged to scale back production by a third and schoolyard activities were suspended.
Olaiz said levels of air pollution in this city of 18 million had been cut by about 10 percent a year since 1995.
But this year, the pollution has been made far worse by raging fires which have torched much of Mexico’s remaining woodland and covered the region from Costa Rica to Texas in a thick pall of noxious smoke.
Thursday night’s rainfall drew sighs of relief from residents after a prolonged El Nino-provoked drought that had delayed the summer rainy season by nearly a month.
Health experts say living in Mexico City can cost you your life, because contamination on any given day exceeds international limits by two to three times.
Olaiz said an estimated 500,000 Mexico City residents suffered some sort of health problem because of the smog. Of those, up to 5,000 could develop a chronic, deadly disease.
But the environmental health chief said it was hard to identify the pollution’s impact on average life expectancy because the population was still very young and improving living conditions meant life expectancy was actually rising.
Is living in Mexico City bad for your health? "Yes, of course", Olaiz conceded.
Pollution levels in Guadalajara, in the northern industrial center of Monterrey, in the border towns of Tijuana and Ciudad Juarez and in Puebla, periodically covered by ash and fumes from the Popocatepetl volcano, were also worrying, he said.
Olaiz said authorities had 190 programs in place to try and reduce pollution, including encouraging the replacement of old cars with cleaner new models and developing public transport.
In addition to ground-level ozone, a poisonous gas caused by car emissions, Mexico’s air has an extremely high content of toxic microscopic particles, such as metals like cadmium.
Olaiz said one of the sources of the particles was industrial pollution. But studies had also shown that soil erosion was to blame, highlighting the urgent need for reforestation programs around the capital.
"We have to teach people that while land has an economic value in the city, it also has an important environmental value", Olaiz said.
Thursday, June 3, 1999
The western Mexican state of Nayarit was blasted by blistering heat, posting its highest ever recorded temperature of 117.5 degrees Fahrenheit, official news agency Notimex reported.
Notimex said the record heat, beating a temperature of 115.7 Fahrenheit recorded in 1983, swept across the plains of the state after a high pressure front moved toward Mexico's Pacific coast.
Modesta Mendoza Gutierrez, head of the meteorological department of the National Water Commission, told the agency temperatures in the state capital Tepic were a fresher 95 degrees Fahrenheit.
Nayarit is not on a list of 10 Mexican states, comprising an area the size of France and Spain combined, which have sought emergency federal funds because of a severe drought.
All of Mexico's border states with the United States, except Baja California, have been declared disaster zones after one of the worst dry seasons this century. Vultures circle cattle whose bones poke through their skin while many reservoirs have been left totally dry.