International Bulletin - August 1999
Vietnam in Transition: The Canaries of Saigon
The canaries of Saigon peep feebly throughout most of the year, but during the three hottest months, March, April and May, the song these small, exquisite birds sing is a silent scream, warning that danger--and possibly death--is on the way.
The danger is real and insidious, because it is disguised.
Even today, schoolchildren the world over know that canaries used to be carried into the deepest pits of American coal mines to warn miners with their song when the lethal gases--released after shiny walls of ebony were dynamited to retrieve their precious nuggets--would begin to seep into the tunnels where the miners labored.
In Saigon, an exotically beautiful but dangerous city, the canaries wear many disguises. In this throbbing metropolis whose vibrancy and beauty mask a serious potential threat to human life from elevated levels of air pollution, the canaries sing their warning song exquisitely. They are the men and women of Ho Chi Minh City - Saigon, whose brilliant feathers disguise a haunting fear of future trouble and whose innocent melodies seduce, most beguilingly, just before they die.
Saigon, renamed Ho Chi Minh City in 1975 to honor the revolutionary hero who led Vietnam to independence, is a city in transition, vibrant, dynamic and brimming with art, music and high fashion.
Tragically, it is also a city, like many in developing countries, whose astronomical air pollution levels are generated by cheap leaded gasoline--in emerging nations the fuel of transportation and commerce so essential to inclusion in the free market economies of a global society.
Gasoline is a liquid distilled from petroleum which is a mineral oil found underground and refined for use as a fuel (gasoline or kerosene). Another fuel, bituminous coal, burns with a smoky flame, contains a black sticky substance called bitumen, obtained from petroleum, and is commonly used for covering roads.
The petroleum used in the developed nations of the world is refined for use as a safe fuel by removing, among other chemicals, the metallic element, lead. Unrefined gasoline costs less to produce because the expensive process of removing lead and other chemicals is eliminated.
Today, leaded gasoline used in motor vehicles is found primarily in developing nations. While the more affluent countries of the world ban it in favor of the more expensive but safer unleaded gas, poorer nations, presumably cannot afford such luxuries.
Unrefined petroleum, or leaded gasoline, gives off a number of toxic gases and acids when burned, including carbon dioxide, carbon monoxide, hydrogen sulfide and sulfuric acid. When suffused in the air we breathe, these fuels carry the seeds of a litany of human illnesses, including asthma, bronchitis, emphysema and lung cancer, as well as cardiovascular diseases and mental retardation.
Ultimately, under specific climatic conditions, the exhaust from engines generated by unrefined gasoline can contribute to death in humans exposed to high levels of lead, carbon monoxide and other toxic chemicals that pervade the air and filter gently but insidiously into the life-giving water that sustains human existence on earth.
This is why the more affluent nations of the world have banned leaded gasoline as a fuel for motor vehicles and bituminous coal for use in heavy industry and home heating because both are obtained from unrefined petroleum that contains lead.
In Ho Chi Minh City, however, and throughout the developing nations of the world, lead in significant quantities is emitted every day into the atmosphere from the exhaust of millions of motor vehicles that jam the streets. In Ho Chi Minh-Saigon, a city of seven million people, the vehicle of choice is the motorcycle, less expensive than most cars and faster than the bicycle or "cyclo", a reincarnation of the ancient rickshaw, with which it does battle in a daily war for turf on the crowded streets of Saigon.
During the three warmest months of the year in Ho Chi Minh City, in tropical South Vietnam, the heat and humidity act much like an enveloping shield or "greenhouse effect", trapping the noxious fumes from motorcycles and other vehicles at street levels where the cyclists ride unprotected, inhaling the concentrated toxicity that fills the air.
In the West, and particularly in the United States, where similar problems or industrial pollution have been significantly ameliorated in recent years, the fifty-first anniversary of the worst recorded industrial air pollution accident in history will occur this fall, on Halloween night, October 31st.
On the same date in October, in 1948, a disaster occurred in Donora, Pennsylvania, which killed twenty people and left hundreds seriously injured and dying.
In vivid description of the event, Chris Bryson, a New York based investigative reporter and co-author with Joel Griffiths of "Fluoride and the A-Bomb" (Winter 97-98 Earth Island Journal), wrote:
"Horror visited the US Steel company town of Donora on Halloween night, 1948, when a temperature inversion descended on the town. Fumes from the US Steel smelting plants blanketed the town for four days, and crept murderously into the citizens, homes.
If the smog had lasted another evening, the 'casualty list would have been 1,000 instead of 20,' said local doctor William Rongaus at the time. Later investigations by Rongaus and others indicated that one-third of the town's 1,000 residents were evacuated or hospitalized. A decade later, Donora's mortality rate remained significantly higher than neighboring areas."
Last Modified: June 05, 2010