Chileans Face Downside of Economic Growth--Staggering Air Pollution

On a clear winter day in downtown Santiago, you can see a couple of blocks. Overhead, the sky is blue, but at street level the view gives way to a rat-colored haze. The Chilean capital is choking on its own prosperity.

By most measures, Santiago is the world’s third most-polluted city, after Mexico City and Sao Paulo, Brazil. Every winter season, roughly May to August in the Southern Hemisphere, thermal inversions in these windless skies trap sour, noxious smog on the floor of Santiago’s valley.

To be sure, geography is a factor. Stunning mountains, rarely seen in winter, encircle the city, and access on three sides is by tunnel.

Headlong Race

In recent years, however, Chile’s headlong race toward economic development, with few environmental controls, has brought pollution to crisis levels--made especially acute this winter by the absence of rain to clean the air.

Pollution meters, newly improved to give more accurate assessments, registered “critical” or “dangerous” levels on nine days from May 1 to mid-June. Most of the rest of the time there were readings of “fair” or “bad,” which doctors describe as perilously dirty.

This unprecedented filth has suddenly produced a consensus in favor of costly and imaginative changes that would create a better balance between growth in a Third World country and environmental safety.

Facing growing public pressure, the government invoked emergency measures for the first time in late June, ordering half the buses off the roads and closing 50 industries until the levels of pollution dropped.

Reviving Trolleys

Longer-term proposals include re-creating a network of electric trolley-buses that were phased out in recent decades and a toll system for vehicles graded according to their contamination output.

“All countries pass through a phase of terrible pollution,” Dr. Mario Munoz, director of the government Environmental Health Department, said recently. “Governments prefer to encourage industrialization, forgetting the hazards, until the people demand change. Now we are seeking solutions.”

Chile’s problem comes less from gases such as carbon monoxide and ozone than from particulates--mainly hydrocarbons from incompletely burned fuels, especially the fuel burned in diesel buses. At their worst, the levels of particulates have exceeded 500 micrograms per cubic meter, over the top of the scale. This has occurred on six days in recent weeks and at one station reached a record 878 on June 9.

U.S. Environmental Protection Agency standards dictate that more than 150 micrograms per cubic meter is unacceptable. The highest reading at a Los Angeles-area testing station in 1988 was 289.

Every winter in the Santiago Valley, which is home to 4.5 million of Chile’s 12 million people, hospitals are packed with respiratory patients suffering from a variety of afflictions linked more or less directly to the foul air.

One day recently at Luis Calvo McKenna Hospital, a major pediatric hospital for Santiago, dozens of mothers filled the emergency waiting room with their wheezing, gasping infants and toddlers. Inside, doctors gave most of the children oxygen for a couple of hours, placed them in purified plastic enclosures and gave them injections to reduce inflammation in the lungs.

Dr. Claudio Alegria, acting director of the hospital, said respiratory illnesses have always been common in Chile during winter, when cold and rain contribute to viruses. This year, there has been drought, but the number of cases has remained constant, he said, “which makes us think that the smog is keeping the levels high.”

“We can resolve the medical problems easily, but the child then goes back out into the same environment, and he needs to come back here three or four days later,” Alegria said. “The hydrocarbon particulates are the worst because they are so small that they penetrate the smallest pores of the lungs.”

Maria Quintero Aguilera was waiting with her 2 1/2-month-old son, Nicholas, to see a doctor for the second time in four days. The boy was red-faced and struggling for breath. Like many others, including specialists, Quintero said she could not be certain about the smog’s role in such illnesses--but she knew her baby was suffering, and she blamed the bad air.

‘Crying and Suffering’

“The eyes go red, the breathing is difficult,” she said. “They gave us this oxygen spray can and a tube to give him clean air when he fights to breathe, but it doesn’t help much. He quiets down and can sleep a few hours, but he wakes up and starts crying and suffering again.”

Lionel Gil, a professor of biochemistry at the University of Chile, found in a recent study that the particulate pollution in Santiago includes seven cancer-causing substances, among them benzopyrene. Depending on his success in getting funding, he plans more research to try to measure the actual threat to humans from these carcinogens.

“The problem we could have in Santiago,” he said in an interview, “is that these genetic mutations can ‘sleep’ for 20 years and then transform into tumors in the body. So, we may not see the impact of the contamination now but in 10 or 20 years.”

The number of recorded fatalities from lung and bronchial tumors in one annual survey rose from 500 to 1,400 from 1960 to 1985, Gil said, at a time when cigarette smoking declined and better treatment for these diseases reduced the fatality rate. He emphasized that it is impossible to link that increase definitively with air pollution, for lack of adequate research.

“One doesn’t want to alarm the population,” he said, “but people should know the risks. Countries usually think about their environment when they have already developed, but by then the damage may already have been done.”

The pollution “is a result of economic development without regard for the environment,” Gil said. He noted that the number of vehicles in Santiago increased from 358,000 in 1985 to 423,000 in 1987 and estimated that the number will be 500,000 by the end of this year.

Chileans of all political shades are caught up in the debate over what to do, and this is regarded as a vital first step in dealing with the problem. Many want the environment to be a major issue in the election campaign to choose a successor to President Augusto Pinochet in December.

Students take part in pollution “die-ins” at major intersections, and Roman Catholic priests wearing white-gauze face masks have staged protest marches. The Roman Catholic cardinal of Santiago recently urged that pollution be made an urgent priority to protect the people, especially the young and the aged.

Humberto Jorquera, a professor of engineering and adviser to the Transport Ministry, said developing countries “have had to sacrifice the optimum for the possible.” After years of comparatively healthy growth, he said, society is focusing on the hidden costs in improved health care.

Jorquera is in charge of longer-term planning, including the trolley-bus program that will soon become a reality. The main source of particulate pollutants in Santiago is the bus system: 11,500 aging, diesel-powered buses.

Exemplifying the hazardous priorities of the past, in the 1950s and 1960s, bus operators were urged to convert from gasoline to cheaper diesel, and trolley-buses were phased out.

The private bus fleet, allowed to grow willy-nilly during the free-market Pinochet years, must be reduced substantially, most analysts agree, and the remaining buses need to be better maintained.

Jorquera said the inspection system was revamped in January and that buses built before 1968 were ordered out of service. Since then, 2,000 more buses have been retired, although many are believed to be operating clandestinely.

A pilot program has put 16 buses on the roads using a variety of alternative sources of fuel and catalytic converters, and studies are under way on creating electric-powered suburban rail lines to exploit the hydroelectric potential from the nation’s wealth of rivers.

Dr. Guido Girardi, a health expert for the opposition Party for Democracy, estimates that the cost of smog-related visits to doctors reaches $5 million a year. Living in Santiago, he said, is like smoking 10 to 20 cigarettes a day.

He noted that a Japanese scientist, Hiroshi Kiwi of the Fukuoka Environmental Research Center, ranks Santiago No. 1 in the world in qualitative terms of pollution, with particulate levels 20 times higher than in other industrial cities.

Jorquera put it this way: “Pollution is the most democratic of afflictions. It affects everyone, regardless of their beliefs. Yet, the concern about air pollution in Santiago is only about five years old. Historically, we all share the blame. “