Singapore Haze

Hi Everyone - sorry for the lack of recent blog posts.  Not too much new and exciting has been going on I guess! I had back to back work trips to Bangkok and Kuala Lumpur a few weeks ago so I did get out of Singapore for a few days.  I've been hanging around here ever since.

I'm not too sure how much the news covered this in the States, but a few weeks ago we had to deal with the 'Singapore Haze'.  I guess it happens every summer, but a few weeks ago the haze in Singapore was the worst it's ever been!  The previous record was 226 PSI (Pollutants Standard Index) back in 1997.  This time it hit 401 PSI (see pictures below).  

I guess the farmers in Indonesia burn their fields every summer in order to fertilize the land.  They'd rather do that than paying for fertilizer apparently.  It honestly reminded me of home a bit when they burn the rice fields in the valley...but x1000.  So they all started burning the fields at the same time and the wind pattern blew all of the smoke directly to Singapore.  For the first few days, it wasn't that bad but it then got worse.  People started wearing masks outside, some said that the air quality was too bad to come to work (ha!) and it stayed pretty awful for about a week.  I had planned a work happy hour on an outdoor roof top right during the worst of the haze and we definitely had to move it inside!

The haze is just about gone now (the winds shifted north so the smoke went to Malaysia) but we've still got the 'Haze Watch' going on in the media...

Hope it doesn't come back...it was nasty!!!!

Here are some pictures:

What the view from my apartment looks like on a normal day:

What it looked like during the haze:

What should have been Marina Bay Sands...you can kind of make the towers out...:

Even the haze couldn't stop us from sitting outside for drinks!  And no, we didn't wear the masks - they were just for pictures!