New Year's Equivalent of "Bah, Humbug"

I got a bad cold and spent New Year's Eve in bed. I was awoken by a barrage of fireworks and spent the next three hours listening to bangs and whizzes while trying to get back to sleep. In this time I saw the air fill with fog, so that the tree at the end of the garden became faint and blurred. Eventually I fell asleep.

I was therefore delighted to read that I wasn't the only one to have a bad time. Bochum was covered by a smog so bad that buses stopped their service and taxis only went for special rates: "Sorry mate, I can't even read the meter in this fog". Car drivers often gave up, as described in a comment from kindly citizen Ralf Kelm.

We were stood on the pavement when a woman stopped her car and asked if we knew where we were. She thought she was still on the motorway, but was surprised to see so many houses. The motorway exit was about half a mile away. You could see absolutely nothing. We took her with us for the next five hours. After 7am the visibility improved enough for her to continue her journey.

Now I can't prove that the fog was due to the fireworks, although I suspect it was. Smog, as seen for decades in cities such as London (and probably Bochum and the whole of the Ruhr) was caused by air pollution from houses and factories. The London smog is described here by lost motorcyclist Arthur Musson.

On one occasion, I was motor cycling down Queens road Yardley on my way home from Mary’s, when I realised I was not on the road. I stopped, put my foot down, and found that I was in a field.

A useful measure for air quality is PM10 concentration. PM10s are particles less than 10 micrometres in diameter, and their concentration can be described in micrograms/cubic metre (μg/m³). A typical concentration of these particulates is 30 μg/m³ . During the great London smog of 1952, which killed around 12,000 people, the concentration was estimated to be 4000-14000 μg/m³. The German federal ministry for the environment measured the PM10 concentration over the last-but-one New Year, and found that in a city area the concentration rose to almost 4000 μg/m³ just after midnight, which is the lower estimate for the concentration in the great London smog. Congratulations, fellow citizens, you've created a minor environmental disaster! The ministry's recommendation is that people

limit their personal use of fireworks, or even do without them completely.

Happy New Year!