The Haze

Well, I figured I better write a post about this, since it was such a part of our daily lives for the better part of a month. THE HAZE. Apparently doesn't affect Singapore every year, but when it does, it can be quite bad, as we discovered.
Every year in Indonesia, farmers slash and burn forests to make room to grow plants to produce palm oil. After 2015, Singapore supposedly put some new fines and regulations into place to eliminate the effects of the haze on Singapore, but it didn't work so well this year.  It was a pretty dry year in addition to winds blowing the right way.

 

At first, it was just like oh, okay, it's pretty overcast today. But, it started getting worse and worse. Checking haze.gov and acqin.com became regular habits. There's a lot of drama over whether or not the Singapore government actually reports an accurate reading of the pollution. More on that later. We bought N95 masks, which are super hot to wear, but we did a few days! We stayed inside as much as possible, and all went a bit stir crazy!

 

The biggest drama was with schools and how they were decided to let kids go outside in play or not in the haze. The Singapore government has a 24 hour average of haze levels, which you can imagine, is delayed in showing real time readings. Many schools, Emmeline's included, used this measurement as a determining factor if kids were inside or outside. If 24 PSI levels were above 100, then everything was indoors (lunch, recess, balcony play, etc.) However, there were several days, when air quality was "fine" on that scale but quite obviously much worse. After several unresponsive emails, I decided to take matters into my own hands. I did a lot of research and learned a lot, and ultimately wrote a proposal suggesting that 1 hr. government readings should also be used in determining if kids were outside or not. After circulating as best I could, I have 220+ signatures supporting me when I went to meet with the superintendent. Ultimately they agreed with me, I think partially because the Australian school which is attached to ELV (Emmeline's school) was already using this policy, but at least they changed things!

 

Thankfully, by the time we returned from Japan, everything was back to normal, and we have only had to worry about the haze on the occasional day here and there. It was pretty gross looking outside and seeing how thick it was. It made me realize how quickly we are killing this planet, and I'm trying my best to avoid buying anything with palm oil in it now....it's surprising how many things it's in!

Even at night it's hazy!