About a month or so ago I wrote about our dry weather. It is of course the dry season here in northen Thailand, but this year is apparently much drier than usual. To be clear, it HAS NOT RAINED here since OCTOBER. It’s now mid-March. That is nearly five full months without rain. The effects of this dryness, combined with the fires that are constantly burning around town and on the mountainsides, are becoming unbearable.
We’re no longer able to do much exercise in the evenings, be it jogging, aerobics, or bicycling, because the smoke gets into our lungs and is quite painful. I’ve been going in the mornings, when the previous days’ fires have burnt out and new ones have not yet started. Smoke creeps into our house during the day from multiple directions (especially our next-door-neighbors’ back yard) and our outside surfaces are constantly covered in dust and ash, no matter how frequently I sweep. (Inside is not much better.)
When Robert went to the market yesterday evening to buy groceries, he came back and reported that in addition to choking on the smoke, he was seeing large pieces of ash falling from the sky all around. I went outside and sure enough, I could see them too. We took a photo of this one that had fallen in the road in front of our house. You might also notice in the photo that the sky is white, not blue, due to the thickness of the smoke and other dry dusty stuff in the air.
Today’s Bangkok Post had an article headlined, “Government set to declare state of emergency; One-week deadline for haze to improve,” about our air quality. You can read it by clicking on the link. If you do read it, be sure to notice the theory promoted by the Chief of the Chiang Mai Environmental Office as to why the air is so bad this year...
3 comments:
The fires, smoke and smog are things that I will NOT MISS at all! Ugh - that's a big piece of ash!
I HEAR YAH GIRL! I have completly given up cleaning my house. I dont have a smoke problem, but I do have a construction problem. They are tearing and rebuuilding the cement wall down around my house and tearing down many of the houses on my street to build a new road. Because of the lack of rain I just have constant dust, from the construction, that gets into my house...one day I sweep, the next it looks like I havnt cleaned in a month. One week left one week left;)
ewww, I don't know that I would be willing to subject my lungs to such debris.
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