Unpleasant smell of acrid olives carries from Alentejo
The Lisbon region woke up today to a bad smell “with characteristics of acrid/olives, similar to what happened last year”.
Air quality researcher Sofia Teixeira has told Lusa that ‘the culprit’ is believed to be the olive pomace processing factories in the Alentejo region”.
It happened almost exactly a year ago, and coincided with a southwesterly wind (of the kind prevalent today).
Teixeira, who works at the Faculty of Science and Technology of Universidade Nova de Lisboa, referred to the “very specific meteorological conditions” involved: first, the pong, and second the phenomenon of thermal inversion between midnight and 9am, which resulted in what we call the helmet effect, in which these compounds (for this read: bad smells) are trapped in lower layers of the atmosphere (…) causing us some discomfort”.
According to Portuguese Environment Agency APA, the situation of “weak atmospheric dispersion, combined with the occurrence of weak winds from the southeast quadrant” led to concentrations of odorous compounds in the Greater Lisbon region, a situation that “improves in the afternoon”, but which could “occur again in the early hours of the morning, but with less intensity”.
“Continuous and real-time” monitoring of air quality at the network’s stations “does not reveal any problems in terms of the pollutants measured with effects on health”, APA continues, neglecting to mention the pollution habitually present over Lisbon, a lot of it due to traffic (on land and air) to and from the airport.
For Sofia Teixeira, it is important to realise that Portugal has “no framework in air quality legislation” on the subject of odours, unlike other European countries that already have specific regulations on this matter, and which could help to minimise these impacts.
At the moment, as there is no legal obligation, for example, to reduce odours: “only through good will can some strategies or measures be created to adjust production when wind conditions are in certain quadrants”.
Thus, for now and possibly tomorrow, it is a question of holding one’s nose and getting through it.
