Beijing on smog alert as pollution continues to plague north China
Print Edition
Heavy smog continued to choke most of north China yesterday, including Beijing, triggering an orange alert by the national weather center, the second highest in its warning system.
The smog will linger in northern regions and areas along the Yellow and Huaihe rivers today, the National Meteorological Center said.
Beijing, Tianjin and the provinces of Hebei, Henan, Shanxi, Shandong and Anhui were heavily polluted yesterday, with visibility less than 500 meters in some areas, it added.
However, a cold front from northwest China’s Xinjiang Uygur Autonomous Region, bringing a drop in temperature of 6 to 8 degrees Celsius, should help disperse the smog from tonight, it said.
Beijing yesterday maintained the orange smog alert that was first raised in the capital on Sunday morning.
According to the city’s environmental monitoring center, heavy smog will continue to blanket the city until tonight or tomorrow morning. A ban on construction trucks and restrictions on factory output will remain in place, it said.
Schools suspended outdoor activities yesterday and polluting factories were required to reduce production.
The city reported the level of tiny PM2.5 particles in the air to be more than 600 micrograms per cubic meter late yesterday afternoon. Such particles, which are particularly hazardous to health, were the major pollutant, the center said.
Seven of the 12 monitoring sites in downtown Beijing detected PM2.5 density at over 600, 24 times the standard deemed acceptable by the World Health Organization.
Beijing’s outlying district of Fangshan witnessed the worst air, with concentrations of PM2.5 reaching 939 by 5pm yesterday.
The capital’s neighboring Hebei Province was also plagued by severe pollution, with air quality in seven of 11 cities reaching severely polluted levels.
An orange smog alert, first issued on Sunday, remained in place yesterday, closing highways in nine cities, including the provincial capital Shijiazhuang, Hebei traffic police said.
Several hundred freeway toll gates were forced to close in nearby Shandong Province as visibility fell below 200 meters, Xinhua news agency reported.
Beijing’s severe pollution follows a bout of record-breaking smog in the country’s northeast last month, when PM2.5 levels reached 1,400 micrograms per cubic meter in the city of Shenyang — the highest registered so far — and 860 micrograms per cubic meter in neighboring Changchun. It brought back memories of the intense pollution — dubbed the “airpocalypse” — that clouded the capital in 2013 when readings approached 1,000 micrograms per cubic meter.
Such outbreaks of smog are common across China, where Greenpeace in a recent study found nearly 80 percent of cities had pollution levels that “greatly exceeded” national standards over the first nine months of this year.
The smog’s arrival in north China coincides with the season of coal heating and straw burning.
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