A thick cloud of dust enveloping Tuesday a large western part of Iran forced the authorities to close locally schools and to call around 13 million inhabitants to stay at home, according to state television.
The provinces of Lorestan, Ilam, Kermanshah, Kurdistan (West), Zanjan (North-West), Bouchehr (South) and Khouzestan (Southwest) are affected by these measures, according to television. The population is invited not to go out and to wear a mask for any imperative trip, said national television, stressing that locally visibility does not exceed a kilometer.
In Bouchehr, a city located almost 1100 kilometers south of Tehran, air quality is considered on Tuesday as “bad for sensitive groups”, with an AQI index of 108, which more than four times exceeds the concentration of polluting microparticles in the air, deemed acceptable by the World Health Organization (WHO).
-The meteorological services assigned these conditions to the “displacement of a large mass of dust from Iraq to the west of Iran”. This phenomenon, increasingly frequent in Iran, is aggravated by drought.
Monday, more than 240 people were hospitalized for respiratory problems in the province of Khouzestan, according to the official news agency Irna.
In July 2022, the authorities had closed schools and administrations in Tehran and in its periphery due to the pollution caused by a sandstorm.
