What is the Mexico City Project?
CHUCK: In collaboration with a number of university and US government laboratory scientists, we’ve been working in Mexico City since 2002. Mexico City is the largest city in North America and the best example we have of a developing mega-city. Within the Valley of Mexico and the Mexico City metropolitan area, there are almost 20 million people. All of the pollution associated with the transportation and the cooking and the heating and the jobs they do is trapped within that one valley each day. In the spring of 2006, we took part in a multi-government agency, multi-national project called “MILAGRO”, which means miracle in Spanish, where about 350 scientists from the United States, Mexico and several European countries, all spent the month of March in Mexico City and in the area around Mexico City measuring what the pollutant levels were in the city and how they evolved, and then following the pollutant plumes as they moved out of the city either northeast, up towards the Gulf of Mexico
