Stories tagged
‘air pollution’

A puff of a test

HIS TRUCK had been apprehended for smoke belching, so there was the driver, furiously pumping his vehicle’s pedal six times while it was parked inside the cavernous North Motor Vehicle Inspection Services (MVIS) building on East Avenue in Quezon City. Earlier, an MVIS technician had inserted a probe into the truck’s tailpipe. The probe was connected to an opacimeter, which measures the black soot from diesel vehicles, and now everyone was waiting for the device to deliver the verdict on the truck. After a few seconds, the opacimeter spat out a short strip of paper. The figures on it said the truck had registered an emission lower than the cut-off point of 2.5 k (light absorption coefficient), which means it had passed the test.