As of 4:00 a.m. Sunday, the Delhi AQI stations all reported Hazardous levels, with most in the 600s; one was at 969 and another at 784.
Via The Guardian: Five million pollution masks to be handed to Delhi residents. Evidently this health disaster originates in a cultural celebration. Excerpt and then a comment:
The residents of Delhi have already begun to forget what it is like to wake up and see the sky.
Almost a week on from Diwali, the thick brown smog that shrouded the city after the festival has showed no sign of shifting. On Friday, as the air became poison and 20 million people struggled to breathe, a public health emergency was declared, with Delhi’s chief minister Arvind Kejriwal declaring the city had turned into a “gas chamber”.
Sachin Mathur, 31, an auto rickshaw driver in north-west Delhi, said he was forced to stay outside for work but had been struggling to breathe as he went about his day, and could barely keep his eyes open on the roads because the pollution made his eyes tear and sting.
“I have been driving auto on Delhi roads for last three years and every year this time after Diwali Delhi becomes like this,” Mathur said. “I am suffering from a throat infection and my eyes are burning. The pollution means I do not get many passengers, so going to a doctor is not affordable.”
The air pollution crisis is now an annual tradition in Delhi at this time of year, thanks to a toxic mixture of smoke from celebration firecrackers combined with the farmers in the neighbouring regions of Punjab and Haryana burning their crop stubble and a cold shift in the temperature locking in the fumes.
But despite promises that new laws and regulations, including the banning of firecrackers, would keep the air cleaner, the air quality index soared to above 500 this week, levels 20 times higher than those deemed healthy by the World Health Organization.
