Air pollution reached “dangerous levels” in 106 Chinese cities at the height of the celebrations welcoming the Lunar New Year due to use of firecrackers and fireworks, a Xinhua tally has found.
Between 8 pm on Wednesday and 10 am on Thursday, the Air quality index (AQI) surpassed 300 in 106 cities. Based on China’s standard, an AQI between 201 and 300 is considered “heavy pollution”, and an AQI of over 300 is defined as “serious”.
The China National Environmental Monitoring Center (CNEMC) put the number of air-polluted cities at 201 from Wednesday night to the daytime of Thursday. More than 40 of them saw “serious pollution.”
Beijing had a superb day on Wednesday in the daytime as the AQI was below 50. While the fireworks celebrations in the night ruined it.
“I just showed off the ‘blue sky’ on my social network in the morning but the smog came back in the night,” lamented a Beijing resident surnamed Chen.
The municipal environment bureau said pollutants rapidly increased from 8 pm on New Year’s eve sufficiently to cause “heavy pollution” at midnight.
The peak readings of PM 2.5, the airborne particles smaller than 2.5 microns in diameter that causes smog, reached 410 mg per cubic meter between midnight to 1 am on Thursday, up 12 percent year on year, according to the Beijing Municipal Environmental Monitoring Center.
Skies in the neighboring Tianjin Municipality and Hebei Province were also polluted due to fireworks. The PM 2.5 level did not drop from its peak until 3 a.m. Thursday, according to the CNEMC.
Cities in the northeast as well as those in Sichuan and Gansu provinces also suffered heavy air pollution, CNEMC’s statistics showed.
A single firecracker would cause heavy pollution within an area of 10 cubic meters, according to the experiment by Shangguan Wenfeng, a professor with the Center for Combustion and Environmental Technology with the Shanghai Jiao Tong University.
