Winds of change

After being kindly and blowing the haze away from Singapore during the F1 Night Race, the wind has done and about turn and started blowing the haze at Singapore and boy is it a doozy!

Check it out! The 24 hour average reads 263 while the 3 hour average reads 317, the latter being in the Hazardous range.

Sometimes I feel that Singapore as a society tends to complicate things too much. 24 hour and 3 hour averages only complicate things for the common man. Still that's the official word.

It's just that it doesn't help when you look out the window and you think to yourself, "No way that is only 100 PSI!"

At times like that, I tend to rely on http://aqicn.org/city/singapore/south/.
Which at the moment is telling me that it is 371 PSI outside .

Was 353 when I took the screenshot.

Anyway the Ministry of Education just announced the closure of schools for tomorrow, 25th September, due to the hazardous air quality. Yay! No school for students but teachers report to work as per normal. Not so yay!

I was remarking to J the other day that the haze had become such a regular yearly affair that Singaporeans were become blase about it. We're certainly can't ignore it now!

Seriously though, it's been an ongoing issue since 1997 and it's close to the 20th anniversary - it's certainly gone on for much longer than the F1 Night Race which is only in it's 8th edition. It is at times like these that I give up on the power of the human race to right the wrongs that we see around us. Every year we'd hear of some summit or other to tackle the haze, some grand plan will be paraded and then the haze comes and goes.

It's been 18 years and nothing concrete has been done about it.

Let's have a look at what lies across the Indian Ocean.

Good, clean fresh air in Perth.
Not sure what's going on in Tasmania though.

Am so looking forward to breathing that in.