Contaminación del aire; or, Why is my tissue black?

When we arrived in Santiago at the beginning of the semester, we were told about the city's epic air pollution. According to what we learned in one of our orientation sessions, Santiago has one of the worst air quality levels in the world- about equal to Bangkok and Manila, and twice as bad as Los Angeles. Santiaguinos have one of the highest rates of asthma in all of Latin America, and last year during the winter, one out of every three or four days was declared an air emergency. To try to reduce the pollution levels, the city government has introduced car restrictions, where cars aren't allowed on the road one day a week, and where the elderly and other at-risk people are urged to stay inside. And the city's gorgeous views of the cordillera looming over it are normally resigned to memory, since the smog in the valley has nowhere to escape.

The view of the Andes, on a clear day, from the bus stop by my house.

At the beginning of the program though, the skies were really clear (at least, compared to my expectations). The cordillera was visible, the air seemed clean, and my host family couldn't stop talking about how much less pollution there was compared to years past. The relative clarity of the air was probably due to the new transportation system, which took thousands of buses off the street and replaced them with ones that ran 70% cleaner. The air was so clean, in fact, that the start of the vehicular restrictions that would limit the number of cars on the roads was postponed a month, something that hasn't happened in a long time.

But in the past week or so, our air quality honeymoon has ended. Looking out my program's office window on the 17th floor now, I can't see more than a half mile though the gray, sooty smog. My family keeps the doors and windows closed to keep the pollution out (as well as to keep the house from freezing, although 50 degrees is perfectly comfortable for them- but that's another matter). And people riding bikes on the street wrap shawls around their faces to keep their air as clean as possible.

I had thought that NYC was plenty polluted, but in comparison to here it's like a rural paradise. Here, most of the time the cordillera is hidden behind the smog that sits above the city. And Santiago is the only place I've been where my snot comes out black because of all the air pollution (sorry for the graphic image, but it's a topic of conversation among the people in my program). I guess it just underlines how different the rest of the world lives than the US- even in a developed country like Chile, air pollution like this is normal. And there are many other parts of the world where it's worse. One thing's for sure- next fall, I'll definietly appreciate running in Central Park and breathing the fresh air there a lot more than I've appreciated it before.