“Hello, boring heaven,” I thought to myself. “I love the crazy hell that is Seoul, Taipei, and Bangkok, but I can only take it in small doses.”

One of the surfer dudes tried to help me out. “Hey, bro. Nobody swims without a wet suit in February. The water’s too cold.” I didn’t respond. I didn’t have to.

(See http://www.v-2.org/displayArti.....le_num=602 for origins of boring heaven / crazy hell terminology.)

The dioxin, heavy metals and etc in the yellow dust make it much worse and are of grave concern, sure. But even without those additions we expats (and the Chinese, Koreans and Japanese & etc) would surely be worried about the yellow dust, because it causes or aggravates asthma, allergies, dry skin and irritations in itself, screws up machinery, befouls water supplies and more. The pollutants are far from the sole concern here; they merely worsen our concerns.

ANYway, there was another fairly bad attack yesterday, when i hit the street about 5:30 pm i could tell right away. Army site says it hit 175 ppm and then about 165 ppm in the late afternoon. Hovering just below 100 all day today. SHIT. As a lifelong asthmatic, i have major concerns about my future here, all of our futures here.

Are you for real? That is the whole reason we EXPATS are concerned is the fact that the dust is poisonous. The thread mentions pollution and everyone who paid attention recognized the real danger. Even the most rabid liberal must have an environmental bent. You are baseless.

railwaycharm, nobody ever said that any tree planting is going to stop any carcinogenic pollution; we have only been talking about the Dust itself here, your own sarcastic comment 18 doesn’t mention any pollution. What i said was, the Chinese government is frantically planting trees to slow down the increase of the dust, but even that is not likely to succeed in doing much good. Most unfortunately.

Your new contention that “the Chinese” do not care about the carcinogenic pollution of their air would be hard to support, i think. Common people and journalists have expressed grave concern over it, and the government has made several major statements and launched several major initiatives in the past few years to deal with it (especially in Beijing with the Summer Olympics coming). The top Chinese authorities are not willing to do what it would take to stop the pollution at the cost of slowing down their economic growth, however. If *that’s* what you mean by “they want the profit” then nobody would argue.

The Chinese government is far from unique in that, of course. Having been born and raised in America’s industrial midwest, Detroit to be exact, i do have plenty of gut-level experience about governments not willing to slow down economic growth in order to quickly resolve severe pollution problems…

Unless you live along the coast in Kangwon, its safe to say that the air quality isn’t all that great in your town. There is always this lingering smell of dust where I live, and the air seems a bit thin, as if it lacks oxygen.

That strikes article says that the April 8th 2006 attack reached 2,353 ppm — WOW! I remember that evening well, how horrible it was — the wife and i went out in it, as there was a party that just couldn’t be missed; we got bad headaches and were coughing right through the next day…

China is spending a huge amount of money on tree-planting and such — but it’s not doing much good so far. Nothing much can be done about the basic root cause of this, which is that some 500 million people are living in an huge area (the Greater Yellow River Basin) that has sufficient water for perhaps 100 million at most. All possible sources of water are already being used, and underground levels are dropping fast. But they’ve kept building golf courses, new apartment complexes and water-using factories. Drought has become ordinary, less evaporation leading to less rain as a negative-spiraling cycle. Planting tree-lines or even entire forests on the rapidly moving borders of the Gobi Desert isn’t going to change this.

If there’s any good answer or plan that’s going to improve the situation any time soon, i haven’t heard of it.

So whadda we gonna do, we who live here in western Korea…?

Thanks for the good info, others — especially Sperwer for that US Army monitoring page http://www.seoul.amedd.army.mi.....efault.asp
(tho your link there doesn’t work due to the period you put on the end). That will be extremely useful…