Jun 21, 2013

of press conference on haze

Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong held a press conference on the haze situation yesterday afternoon at the Istana, together with Minister for Defence Ng Eng Hen and Minister for the Environment and Water Resources Vivian Balakrishnan. Here are the extracts.

What is the tipping point before the Government issues stop-work orders? In Malaysia, for example, once the PSI crosses 300, they close schools. Is there any possibility of that happening here?

Mr Lee:

I don’t think there is any single point where we turn action on or action off on stop work. Because it depends on what people are doing, what their exposure is, what our assessment of the situation is for the past 24 hours and the outlook. And we will have to calibrate our response as we go along. If the haze gets more dense, we will take a gradually escalating series of steps — ask people to work for shorter periods outdoors, put off doing more strenuous work outdoors, take breaks if they are working outdoors, wear masks — we have enough masks for this purpose — and eventually ask for certain categories of work to stop. There is no hard line where we say everything comes to a stop. And indeed it’s not possible for everything to come to a stop because life must go on. We should approach it like that, each day, we should assess what the position and outlook looks like for the next 24 hours and then give guidance.