December 25, 2015
Iran closed all schools for two days this week in Tehran, as air pollution three times the acceptable level blanketed the city in smog.
Air quality in Iran’s capital was the worst for at least nine months, media reports said, and airborne particles from car emissions were at “seven times the standard level.”
“All schools will be closed on Sunday in Tehran and in the … towns of Shahr-e Rey and Islam-Shahr [both south of the capital],” said environment official Mohammad Hadi Heydar-zadeh Saturday.
“If the pollution continues, schools will also be closed on Monday,” he said, and they were.
Traffic will be limited in the city center and some factories will be closed, officials announced.
The state news agency said schools also shut in Alborz province, just west of Tehran province.
Authorities asked state employers to grant mothers time off to look after children who will be unable to go to school and urged the elderly, children and sick people to avoid going outdoors.
Emergency services were also mobilized.
Last December, almost 400 people were hospitalized with heart and respiratory problems caused by heavy pollution in Tehran, with nearly 1,500 others requiring treatment.
The Air Quality Index last Monday showed an average reading of 162—a “red status” warning that the air is unhealthy for everyone, according to World Health Organization standards.
By Saturday it had dropped only slightly to 148, still well above the normal healthy level of between zero and 50. It wasn’t known why education officials waited a week before closing schools.
Visibility was low day-after-day as a grey fog blanketed the capital, and authorities said they expect pollution to worsen in the coming days.
Exhaust fumes from 5 million cars and almost as many motorcycles that ply Tehran’s streets each day make up 80 percent of its pollution, which increases in winter as emissions are pinned near the ground by the cold air.
Decades ago, the capital’s pollution came mostly from brick kilns that were concentrated south of the city. But most of them are gone now and the vast growth in gasoline-powered vehicles has become the new source of much worse levels of pollution.
Health official Khosrow Sadeq-Niat told the state news agency, “The most important sources of pollutants in Tehran are motorcycles and cars whose catalytic converters have been removed.”
A taxi driver said, “We cannot breathe. My eyes are itchy and my head hurts. Traffic is getting worse each day, it is stifling. It is like there is a grey haze hanging over the city. We can’t see the mountains.”
The government has tried to cut pollution by supplying higher quality fuel in the capital, fuel that meets the EU’s euro-4 gasoline standards, Masumeh Ebtekar, the vice president responsible for environmental protection, has said. But an independent group that analyzed fuel samples from local service stations recently said that fuel did not meet the euro-4 standards.
According to the office in charge of monitoring air quality, the air in Tehran was “pure” on only 219 days during the past 16 years or only about one day per month.