MercoPress. South Atlantic News Agency

Contamination in Chile's capital city of Santiago grows worse

Greater Restrictions On Car Traffic Foreseen, As Santiago's Polluted Air Becomes Increasingly Unbearable

Santiago was placed under its eighth "environmental alert" this year on Sunday, a menacing sign that pollution in the Metropolitan Region will be worse than ever in the coming autumn and winter months. Only seven "environmental alerts" were decreed throughout all of 2005.

"All our long-term models suggest that climate conditions this year will be less favorable than last year, and last year things were critical," said Manuel Merino, an environmental academic at the Universidad de Chile's National Environmental Center.

"The situation this year is complicated because it is certain that small particulate matter, what we call PM 2.5 and which is not currently monitored, penetrates respiratory tracts and leads to more cardiopulmonary sickness," said Dr. Juan Luis Castro, the head of Colegio Medico, Chile's physicians' association. "This means more of everything, from allergies to pneumonia." He added that, as in previous years, young children and the elderly will be the most impacted.

With the climatologists predicting dry weather and thermal inversions in the Central Valley, authorities last week suggested that traffic restrictions should be made more severe and should include the city's entire vehicular fleet ? even vehicles with catalytic converters. The tougher vehicle restrictions are supported by a recent study made by the National Environmental Center.

Authorities had hoped that the full implementation of the Transantiago mass transit scheme during the summer would help palliate the contamination by reducing polluting buses from 7,000 to 4,700, but the government announced last week that Transantiago will not be fully implemented until early next year. This means the buses will be active throughout the fall and winter months.

Restrictions on vehicle traffic have been the primary weapon used to control the capital city's unnerving pollution levels since November, 1991, when President Patricio Aylwin's Decree 211 empowered authorities to order 20 percent of Santiago's vehicle fleet to stay at home on environmental "alert" days, and 40 percent on the even more dire "pre-emergency" days. Should contamination reach a "critical" level, almost all of Santiago's traffic could be shut down.

But the 1991 decree exempted cars equipped with catalytic converters. These cars (theoretically) emit one tenth the contaminants of non-equipped vehicles and the exclusion was aimed to induce car owners to switch to cars with the less polluting technology.

When the rules were changed in 1994 to allow restrictions on catalytic cars in dire "pre-emergency" situations, the government had to face down a howl of protest from uptown commuters who said the government had backtracked on its promise to exempt their vehicles. Should authorities now expand the reach of the traffic restrictions to include cars with catalytic converters when an environmental "alert" is called, there may again be an uproar.

Still, restricting catalytic cars in an environmental "alert" situation is the primary recommendation made in a recent report from the National Environmental Center (Cenma) on how best to combat Santiago's pollution.

While Cenma acknowledged that cars equipped with catalytic converters pollute less (assuming they are maintained) than non-equipped vehicles, it said that the growing number of these cars ? 650,000 ? means they contribute significantly to the capital city's pollution and should be restricted when environmental conditions turn bad.

By Steve Anderson The Santiago Times - News about Chile