Bangkok orders work from home as pollution envelops city

Employees at Bangkok City have been instructed to work from home in order to avoid the hazardous air pollution that washed over the Thai capital on Thursday.

In order to assist employees in the approximately 11 million-person city in avoiding the pollution, which is predicted to persist until Friday, the city authorities have asked employers for cooperation.

On Thursday morning, Bangkok was listed s one of the top 10 most polluted cities in the world by the air monitoring website IQAir.

According to IQAir, levels of the most hazardous PM2.5 particles—particles so small they can enter the bloodstream—were more than 15 times higher than the World Health Organization’s yearly recommendation.

Towards the end of Wednesday, Bangkok Governor Chadchart Sittipunt announced that all city workers would work from home on Thursday and Friday.

“I would like to ask for cooperation from the BMA network of about 151 companies and organisations, both government offices and the private sector,” he said in a statement, adding that more than 60,000 people were affected.

BMA is an abbreviation for the Bangkok Metropolitan Administration.

Chadchart said at least 20 of Bangkok’s 50 districts were expected to have unhealthy levels of PM2.5 particles, and the problem would linger because of calm weather.

Air quality in Thailand regularly plummets in the early months of the year as smoke from farmers burning stubble in the fields adds to industrial emissions and vehicle exhaust fumes.

Bangkok and the northern city of Chiang Mai ranked among the most polluted cities in the world on a number of days last year.

A public health crisis is brewing over the problem, with at least two million people in Thailand needing medical treatment because of pollution in 2023.

The government of Prime Minister Srettha Thavisin, which took over in August, has promised to make tackling air pollution a “national agenda”, and a draft Clean Air Act was endorsed by his cabinet last month.

But the problem persists, and a court in Chiang Mai last month ordered the government to come up with an urgent plan to tackle air pollution within 90 days.

With inputs from AFP