An air monitoring report in the first nine months of the year showed that though the concentrations of the pollutants due to the traffic activities have decreased in comparison with the same period of the last year; dust and noise still have been torturing the city’s people.

The average dust concentration ranged from 0.43 to 0.64 mg per cubic meter and 95 percent of indexes could not meet the Vietnamese standards (according to QCVN 05:2009/BTNMT standard, the allowed suspended dust concentration is 0.3 mg per cubic meter.

Meanwhile, the lead concentration was reportedly between 0.27-0.31 µg per cubic meter, the NO2 concentration 0.16-0.21 mg per cubic meter. Besides, with 100 percent indexes not meeting the standards, about 69-87 dB, noise has been cited as an important factor that causes pollution on the routes in HCM City.

Monitoring stations become scrap iron

However, the figures do not truly reflect the pollution level in HCM City, because many monitoring stations have broken down.

According to the HCM City Department of Natural Resources and the Environment, there are nine automatic monitoring stations and six semi-automatic stations in the city.

The stations have been set up and developed through the projects funded by foreign organizations. Four stations were established in 2000 with the sponsor by the Danish government, while the other five were sponsored by the Norwegian government.

The city authorities still allocate budget every year to upgrade the stations and have the equipments replaced. However, the sums of money prove to be very modest which cannot satisfy the demand. Especially, the power voltage and weather conditions have made the equipments downgrading more rapidly than normal.

Since 2009, a lot of automatic monitoring stations have one after another stopped operation.

At present, only two monitoring stations located in Thao Cam Vien Park in district 1 and Thong Nhat Hospital in Tan Binh district are still operational. However, the data recording equipments at the Thong Nhat station have broken down and it cannot receive data.

Meanwhile, the data storage equipments and the equipments containing the index calculation software have also broken down, which does not allow calculating data.

As such, according to Ngo Thanh Duc, Director of the Environment Monitoring and Analysis Center, the air monitoring has been relying on six semi-automatic stations. In fact, the stations also comprise of some simple laboratory equipment with backward technologies. Therefore, the figures prove to be unreliable.

The HCM City Department of Natural Resources and the Environment has submitted to the city’s authorities the project on re-investing the automatic continuous air monitoring system, under which nine automatic monitoring stations, one mobile monitoring station and a training and laboratory would be set up.

It is estimated that the project would cost VND118 billion.

Vietnam has been listed among the 10 countries which have the worst air quality in the world, ranking the 123rd out of the 132 ranked countries. The report was presented at the Davos Economic Forum.

The Ministry of Natural Resources and the Environment affirmed that the ranking is a warning to Vietnam, even though there still exists some problems with the calculation

(Dtinews)