Xo Viet Nghe Tinh Street in Binh Thanh District is typical of the packed streets in Ho Chi Minh City these days.

A face mask is not enough to protect residents of a city tormented by ever-worsening air pollution.

Most of the motorcyclists are wearing masks; not only women but men too are covering their nose and mouth with a small cloth.

“I don’t like covering my face when I’m out in the street,” said Nguyen Van Chau, who was stopping by a tobacco pushcart to buy a mask.

“But I must as it is uncomfortable to breathe otherwise.”

Like Chau, most of the city’s residents find the dirty air inconvenient, or worse.

For officials and experts, it is a critical threat to human health.

In fact, the HCMC Environmental Protection Agency has begun publicizing the readings from its monitoring stations to keep the public alert to the danger.

In the last three months, air quality monitoring stations at six major intersections have recorded an average dust concentration of 0.37 to 0.68 milligrams per cubic meter, which is 1.5 to 2.5 times higher than the level deemed safe.

On the section of road between Rach Chiec Bridge and Thu Duc Junction on the Hanoi Highway, the daily average is always five to six times higher than the safe limit.

But it’s An Suong crossroads in District 12 that tops the black list for the worst dust and gas pollution because of its close proximity to belching industrial parks and export processing zones.

Other hot spots are the intersections along Nam Ky Khoi Nghia Street, where the dust concentration is three to six times too high.

Ho Nghia Dung, who lives on Nam Ky Khoi Nghia, made a complaint that is all too common these days. “Now we have to keep the door closed twenty-four-seven, so we no longer sit out front and chat in the afternoon.”

Nitrogen dioxide is one of the worst air pollutants, and regularly has a concentration two to three times above the safe standard, rising as high as six times above during traffic jams.

Highly toxic carbon monoxide is also on the increase, as is lead, which has a concentration of 0.22 to 0.38 micrograms per cubic meter, or up to 1.5 times higher than in the last months of 2008.

The chronic presence of these contaminants in the air can cause acute pneumonia and bronchitis, and even speed up aging, according to health department officials.

Dirty vehicles

Ineffective exhaust systems and heavier traffic are the main culprits behind the air pollution, and they are only made worse by the narrow streets and constant road work.

Toxic gases from motorbikes account for up to 70 percent of air pollution in large cities, said Nguyen Huu Tri, head of the Mechanized Vehicles Verification Department of the Vietnam Register.

Tri singled out benzene and sulfur dioxide for special mention.

According to the HCMC Department of Natural Resources and Environment, the contribution of motorbikes to air pollution in HCMC is more in the order of 80 percent.

Ngo Ngoc Son from the Vietnam Register said overloading and frequent stopping were hard on vehicle engines and thereby made the emissions dirtier.

“In those conditions, exhaust often contains more impurities than when vehicles run normally,” Son explained, adding that the difference could be seen in the black smoke from the exhaust when a stopped vehicle started moving again.

At a meeting last week, the HCMC Safety Transport Committee reported that, in the first two months of this year, city motorists were stuck in nine traffic jams lasting more than 30 minutes.

The numbers keep on climbing. Last year, 48 traffic jams lasting more than half an hour were recorded, increasing by 19 as against the previous year, the committee said.

Not to mention that most vehicles, be they trucks, buses, cars or motorbikes, usually run well below their design capacity in heavy traffic, so their fuel is not burned completely.

The upshot is more toxic gases like the dioxides of carbon, nitrogen and sulfur, Son said.

Because of the dense traffic, vehicles are moving along at under five kilometers per hour on average, compared to 10 kilometers per hour more than a year before.

The rise in the number of vehicles can only be described as drastic. Every day, according to the committee, a hundred cars and more than a thousand motorbikes are registered in the city.

In fact, there are nearly four million motorcycles with city registration plates, to which can be added the unknown number of unregistered motorbikes and the ones from other provinces, the transport department said.

The streets as they are cannot possibly handle such a burden, said Vo Van Nhuan, the city’s top traffic policeman and overseer of traffic on 3,100 streets with a combined length exceeding 3,000 kilometers.

To pile misery on misery, there are now 100 kilometers of barriers for road work and the transport department just keeps adding more.

The effect of these obstacles is that traffic becomes tighter and slows to a crawl at best, thereby worsening the air pollution to a state almost beyond critical.

Source: Agencies