Ecologically clean regions of Almaty are 'myths'

Ecologically clean regions of Almaty city are nothing but 'myths', chief of the Chemical Analysis Department of Kazhydromet's Almaty office Kharagoz Murzagulova told Tengrinews. Kazhydromet is a Kazakhstan nation-wide state-run meteorological service that has a large network of meteorological and hydrological stations monitoring weather, air, water and its and analyzing content of pollutants, condition of the environment and making agrometeorological forecasts. According Kharagoz Murzagulova, Almaty was in the 27th place among cities of the post soviet space by pollution rate in 2012. The index of air pollution in Almaty city made 11.2 in the first 9 months of this year. The experts are monitoring the ecological condition of the city's region round the clock, checking the content of polluting agents like nitrogen dioxide, sulphure dioxide, formaldehyde and phenol with special equipment. The agency has been collecting data only in four regions of the city, but it is planning to install the monitoring stations in every region of the city in the nearest future. The measurement scale of the air pollution is as follows: 0-4 - 'low', 4-7 - 'medium', 7-13 - 'high', over 13 - 'very high'. The lowest air pollution rates were registered in Almaty's Auezov region in Tastak (9.2) and Aksai (9.5) districts. They followed by Bostandyk region with 9.7, Almaly region with 11.5 and Ainabulak-3 district of Zhetysu region with 13.3 in September, 2013. "We don't have any information on Medeu and Alatau regions, but the stationary equipment is already being mounted there. (...) Anyway, the pollution rates in those regions won't anywhere below 7, i.e. the air pollution rate is 'high' in the city. The monitoring of pollution rate hasn't been showing anything less than 7 for a long time already," Murzagulova said. According to the expert most of the pollution of the 'ecologically clean regions' of Almaty comes from cars and industrial enterprises. Meanwhile, the regions of the city that are located closer to the mountains have cleaner air. By Vladimir Prokopenko