Pollution

Did you know that Krakow is ridiculously polluted? Well neither did I, until it was too late. After Mike accepted this position here, I was sent a link to a bunch of videos about expats living in Krakow and somehow from there I stumbled upon a site talking about the pollution. Apparently it is from diesel cars/buses in the city, lots of industrial sites nearby, and people burning their garbage or coal during the winter for heat - yikes! Krakow sits in a valley and doesn't get a lot of wind to blow all of this away. I copied the info I stumbled upon below, so this is what I now stress about at night when I can't sleep (obviously). I highlighted in red the pollution measurements. Krakow rates a 60 - NYC, 23 and LA 39. Scary! Even scarier is that I just received an air quality report from the kids school (it's about 8 miles outside of the city, so the air is supposed to be cleaner), and needless to say I wasn't really reassured.

Some parts are measuring over 120!!

We have asked a lot of people about this, and they usually tells us it's fine, safe, it's just hysteria, they've lived here for 30 years with no health problems, blah blah blah.  I'm still worried. We've noticed walking around the city that it smells 'dusty', like walking through a construction site. One of our neighbors was burning stuff in his backyard a lot last week, not sure what it was but we were out back and had to come inside and shut the windows. When I asked Mihal about this he said burning of any kind is strictly prohibited in our neighborhood - wonder if there is a way to rat him out?

I really don't want any of us developing asthma, or heaven forbid the C-word that I don't even want to say. I am just hoping that our stay will be short enough that nothing serious will happen. I bought an air purifier that is in the living room now, it's a big room so not sure how effective it is  but I'm hoping to buy some more. I also plan on buying lots of plants for the house  - although we are living in a green area with lots of trees around so not sure if that's necessary but I figure it can't hurt.   But if someone would like to send us over some face masks that we can wear whenever we go out, that would be great. I'm sure no one would stare...
for some reason I am picturing my dad running into his garage to dig out some white dust masks for us ; ) XO

Poland for many years and I would say it is the most cultural of all Polish cities. However, there is a dark side that I can not ignore. That is the pollution. I think the pollution has become so bad in Krakow, that it affects people’s health. It is a cancer hot spot.

Cracow has four times the air pollution of LA and ten times that of NYC. It is a small valley and a million cars and they have cut the trees down for new investments in blocks of flats. Krakow Poland is beautiful but the air quality is low. You can search it online yourself. The way I recommend people to get around it is buy about 30 to 50 large plants in your apartment at the flower market at the end of Krakow. The more the better. Further try to live near a green area.

I have seen many people who look ancient in Krakow because of the air. Their faces have deep lines, they have Krakow face. When they are students they do not have this, but soon they start to look old. It is like smoking a pack a day. I kid you not. In the summer it is a little better because people are not burning coal and plastic to hear their homes. But the winter the air stinks.

I moved out of Krakow because of that and for other reason. The city is beautiful to visit but there is a smog and haze that I can not ignore. If you want to move to Krakow, just be aware of this and take measure to help prevent getting toxic. Take a lot of vitamins and have lots of plants in your house and live if possible out of the valley of Krakow or near the forest.

Many people think the Pollution is from Nowa Huta after the industrialization push by the communist. This is wrong. It is from the cars that were not there ten years ago; and the fact people have machines they buy that allows them to burn trash in the winter to heat their homes. I personally love Krakow, but the pollution is something I do not like. You have to worry about your family’s health. Many children in Krakow have breathing problems and other health problems from the pollution the city ignores.

The Krakow government does not want to talk or address the issue of pollution as they are more about building football stadiums etc. However, it is not the place to live for fresh air.

I also had some trouble with the Krakow Police being horrible and had to write the President before I got any reply. So as much as I have been singing praise of Krakow, because I do love it as I love Poland also. However, the city of Krakow is polluted and not a place for a family. If you are single and want to go out dancing and study art it is the place. But only for a few years. Not to raise a family.

In the old town and Podgórze kids have learning problems maybe from the air quality being low.

If I was moving to Poland maybe I would live in a city with fresh air and cheaper housing and travel to visit Krakow from time to time.

Like everyone from abroad who has decided to live in Krakow, in the back of my mind I know that breathing the air here isn’t terribly good for my health. But how bad is it?

According to Paweł Ciećko, the director of the Malopolska Provincial Inspectorate for Environmental Protection (WIOS), it is “fatalne”, or very bad. In the cities of Europe, Krakow is 16th on the list of the cities with the most polluted air.

Why does Krakow have such bad air quality? It sits in a valley, surrounded by low hills, and is highly developed. Because of the density of development and the surrounding hills, the air gets trapped, and inversions often happen; an inversion is when a layer of warmer air caps the valley, and traps the exhaust we emit daily from our cars and heaters down at the ground level where we breathe. One chance for Krakow is for the wind to come and blow the pollution away. Unfortunately, Krakow is not well blessed with wind: 30 percent of the year no wind blows whatsoever. And when the wind blows, it’s generally on the east-west axis, which brings in the pollution from Silesia and the factories in Skawina in the west, and also some neighbourly pollution from the industrialized area of the Czech Republic around Ostrava. And to the east lies Nowa Huta, which even after the closure of many works remains the main source of industrial pollution in Krakow.

However, the situation today is much better than in the past. After WWII, the authorities decided to proletarianise Krakow, by turning it into an industrial centre. To the east, Nowa Huta was built from scratch, to the south was the pre-war Solvay soda ash factory, which mostly polluted the land and water, but also the air as well. And to the west was the aluminium works in Skawina, whose pollutants included fluoride (a by-product of producing aluminium) that forms an acid that eats glass, much to the detriment of Krakow’s churches. Skawina was closed in 1981, and the Solvay soda works were closed in 1989. Much of Nowa Huta has also closed since the changeover in 1989. The remaining industrial and power stations are much cleaner than they were: industry now produces only 30 percent of the air pollution of Krakow.

Where does the remaining 70 percent of pollution come from? From you and me, unfortunately. Paweł Ciećko from WIOS estimates that around 40 percent of Krakow’s air pollution comes from heating private homes, and 30 percent from transportation, meaning our cars and buses. And the pollution from us is getting worse, not better. More and more people have cars; every day in Krakow more than one and a half million cars move around our city. The rise in prices of electricity and natural gas have pushed more people back to coal heating, or whatever they can find to stick into their ovens.

But how bad is the air we breathe? There are three stations for measuring air quality in Krakow: one on al. Krasińskiego near Jubilat on the river, to measure pollution from traffic, one in Nowa Huta, to measure industrial pollution, and one in Krowodrza, to measure air pollution in a residential area. All the readings from these stations are published daily on the Internet at http://213.17.128.227/iseo.

The most representative measurement for general air pollution is PM10, or particulate matter of less than 10 micrometres. PM10 are airborne particles, and the smaller they are, the deeper they penetrate into our lungs and the more damage they do. The composition of PM10 depends on where you are, but in cities it results from the oxidation of the other gases associated with air pollution (sulphur dioxide [SO2], and all the nitrous oxides [Nox]), as well as all the soot that comes from what we burn. Generally, PM10 is associated with asthma, lung cancer and heart disease. The number of premature deaths in the EU25 countries attributed to human-created PM10 was estimated at 348,000 people in 2000.

What levels of PM10 are considered acceptable? The World Health Organization guidelines set the acceptable concentration of PM10 at 20 μg/m3. In the European Union, the maximum level considered healthy is 40 μg/m3. Krakow regularly averages around 60 μg/m3.

How does Krakow compare to other cities in terms of PM10? The major cities of Europe are less: in a study done in 2000, Paris was at 12 μg/m3, London 23, Berlin 25, Rome 35. In the U.S., New York was 23, while L.A., famous for its smog, was at 39, still much lower than Krakow. But on the bright side, Krakow’s 59 μg/m3 would be extremely clean for a Chinese city. And Cairo had a PM10 reading of 178!

The city has been taking steps to make things better: outer ring roads are being built, so that cars passing through Krakow don’t have to drive through the city centre. There has been a policy since the 70s to push people to convert their coal burning stoves to electricity and gas. All new buildings in Krakow are forbidden from using coal for heating. But Paweł Ciećko from WIOS says any improvement in the air depends largely on people changing their behaviour. Much of the pollution comes from burning the wrong things, in the wrong way: Cracovians often use their stoves to get rid of their garbage, even throwing plastic bottles into the toxic soup we breathe. If people learned how dangerous this is, we could be saved some of the worst pollution. Car use is also increasing yearly, along with its accompanying air pollution: a greater use of mass transit, more parking facilities at the edge of the city, and more travel by bike would also improve air quality.