The En­vi­ron­men­tal Man­age­ment Au­thor­i­ty (EMA) says while there has been some im­prove­ment in the air qual­i­ty lev­els at the Beetham Land­fill and in Port of Spain, that air qual­i­ty has been record­ed at UN­HEALTHY lev­els.

The most re­cent read­ing—from the EMA’s Am­bi­ent Air Qual­i­ty Mon­i­tor­ing Sta­tion lo­cat­ed at Beetham, Port of Spain— is 189 points, record­ed at 1 pm to­day.  This is a sig­nif­i­cant im­prove­ment from the read­ing tak­en 24 hours ago, at 1 pm on Thurs­day, which was 342 points.

Dur­ing the morn­ing pe­ri­od to­day, the air qual­i­ty had reg­is­tered as VERY UN­HEAL­TY, in the 200–300-point range, which the EMA not­ed was an im­prove­ment over yes­ter­day’s HAZ­ARDOUS lev­els.

Notwith­stand­ing the im­prove­ment, the EMA is still ad­vis­ing ex­treme cau­tion:

“It is not­ed that ex­treme cau­tion is still re­quired by all per­sons in the vicin­i­ty, par­tic­u­lar­ly the el­der­ly, chil­dren, and those with res­pi­ra­to­ry ail­ments.  The high read­ing is due pri­mar­i­ly to the smoke and par­tic­u­late mat­ter as­so­ci­at­ed with the fire at the Beetham Land­fill.”

Ac­cord­ing to the EMA, a read­ing of 189 points means:

“Peo­ple with heart or lung dis­ease, old­er adults, chil­dren, and peo­ple with res­pi­ra­to­ry ail­ments and al­ler­gies should avoid pro­longed or heavy ex­er­tion.  Every­one else should re­duce pro­longed or heavy ex­er­tion.”

Health ef­fects of such poor air qual­i­ty in­clude:

“In­creased ag­gra­va­tion of res­pi­ra­to­ry symp­toms in sen­si­tive groups in­clud­ing old­er adults, chil­dren, and peo­ple with res­pi­ra­to­ry ail­ments and al­ler­gies; in­creased ag­gra­va­tion of heart or lung dis­ease and pre­ma­ture mor­tal­i­ty in peo­ple with heart or lung dis­ease; and in­creased res­pi­ra­to­ry ef­fects in the gen­er­al pop­u­la­tion.”

The Au­thor­i­ty says it is li­ais­ing close­ly with part­ner agen­cies, such as SWM­COL to ob­tain sta­tus up­dates, and all rel­e­vant agen­cies, in­clud­ing the Min­istry of Health, con­tin­ue to mon­i­tor the sit­u­a­tion.

The EMA says fur­ther de­tails will be pro­vid­ed as the sit­u­a­tion un­folds.

It is en­cour­ag­ing mem­bers of the pub­lic to vis­it the fol­low­ing link to ac­cess ad­di­tion­al in­for­ma­tion https://ei.weblakes.com/RTTPub­lic/Dsh­Br­dAQI