Off the scale pollution

It would be hard to let it go by without a mention given that it made the news in England but a couple of weeks ago we had some extreme pollution, even for Beijing. After much campaigning the scale of pollution adopted by the government has been changed to be in line with that published by the US embassy, which in the past was always higher than the government measure. Regardless over one weekend it went off both scales - levels are defined up to 500 and the rating peaked at almost 800. Looking out the window the buildings a few hundred metres away were not visible and going outside the air did not taste good. In response we were house bound and concentrated our air purifiers in the living room and hunkered down hoping for some wind to blow the pollution away. Not so much fun but perhaps the government will step up its measure to tackle this huge problem, at least we can only keep our fingers crossed. As an indicator of how bad it was, here's a couple of pictures. One with smog levels at about 500, the other at about 60. No prizes for guessing which is which....