Clean Air

I’m sitting in the airport lounge waiting for a flight to the States – New Jersey to be precise. It has been six and a half months since I have been there, and I know that when I reach Princeton it will be as if I have never been away. I should land at around six in the morning, pick up a rental car and drive to a friend’s house. Then a shower and change of clothes and a lovely morning playing bridge with friends. I am then off to pick up Emma and we have three days of all sorts of appointments planned before heading off to the UK mid week.

But the title of this blog is “Clean Air”. It is winter in Brazil, so that means that there is very little rain. The air quality is pretty dismal at the best of times, and for me personally, the pollution gives me all the symptoms of seasonal allergies. I take anti-histamine every morning and drops in my eyes to help with the itching. When I get in the car with Marcelo, I have to reassure him that it is only allergies, and not the dreaded “gripe”.

I recently read that the air quality in Sao Paulo is so bad that by living here, one’s life expectancy is reduced by anything up to three years. I guess there are ways of measuring such a claim, but I work on the principle that if we are only here for a few years, it probably won’t make much difference.

Sao Paulo is a city of around 10 million people. You can double that number if you include the metropolitan area. It is the 7th largest city in the world by population, but that said, every time there is a census somewhere in the world, those numbers change. There are 6 and a half million cars, or 9 million cars in the metropolitan area. Those numbers increase every day. Sao Paulo is a concrete jungle with construction going on absolutely everywhere. I recently read that the Government is actually holding back construction, because they are waiting for a new hydro-electric power station to come on stream. Until that happens, there is concern that the electricity supply system won’t be able to cope with all the new offices, apartments and shopping centers that are springing up everywhere.

There is a street of Favelas (slums), in one part of the city that I drive past very often. Marcelo pointed to them the other day and told me that each of the occupiers were being offered R$ 100,000 (about US$ 60,000) to move out. Imagine, living on under US$ 10 per day and being offered US$ 60,000 to move – a king’s ransom. But the profit to the developer is many multiples of that sum. A low rise Favela is cleared, an office block or apartment building rises.

More worrying to me than the quality of the air is the information that I also recently read, about the quality of the water. We have a reservoir to the south of the city which I assume is fed from the Pinheiros River that runs through the centre of the city. This river is really a large canal which, I have no doubt, takes all the runoff water that is discharged through the drainage system. Sadly it seems it also takes all the raw sewage from the Favelas.


With a city of 10 million people, the water treatment plants are under enormous strain, so the advice is not to drink the water. We have a filter jug that I use for making tea and coffee, etc, but for cooking I usually just run the tap. Now it seems that I shouldn’t be using straight tap water for cooking but instead, should be using the filtered stuff. I suppose the same rules apply to brushing teeth, and making sure that any water we take to drink during the night is also filtered. I dread to think what the tap water is doing to our insides. We have always made ice using filtered water but now I have to really think about all the other uses of water in our daily lives.

Last Tuesday there was a rain storm. It was unusual in its ferocity and that fact that we are in the middle of the dry and cold season. It has been really cold here, and for the first time I have been wearing winter clothes and layers of them.

But back to the storm. It lasted several hours and the consequence was that many areas of the city lost power. My friend was without power for 20 hours. It was a cold shower for her husband that morning. Marcelo told me that he had arrived at my house at 6 in the morning because he had no power at his house and wanted to use the shower in his bathroom in my basement.

With no power, there are no traffic lights and as Brazilians are bad drivers at the best of times the added complications of rain and no traffic lights is just a recipe for disaster and delays. Steve took about forty minutes to get home – it is a journey that normally takes 10 – 15 minutes.

But, notwithstanding all of the problems, I am still enjoying living in Brazil That said, I am very happy to be travelling to New Jersey to experience clean air in my lungs, water that I don’t have to filter and drivers that know the right side of the road on which to drive.