Officials use mist cannon to fake air quality data, end up freezing building

We can only imagine their faces when they arrived in the morning

China has earned praise this winter for improving upon its seasonally smoggy skies, however, some local officials are now being punished for taking things too far by trying to “water down” air quality readings.

In order to be able to falsely brag that they had managed to meet the country’s air quality standards, a pair of environmental ministry officials in Shizuishan, Ningxia ordered sanitation workers to spray the building that houses the city’s air quality monitoring equipment with mist cannons overnight, hoping to secretly wash away troublesome pollutant particles in the nearby air.

Unfortunately for them, their deception was easily discovered the following day when the Environmental Protection Bureau building was found covered in an extremely suspicious layer of ice.

For their tampering, both officials were slapped on the wrist, issued with “public warnings” by the local Shizuishan government, reports Btime.com.

Over the last few years, a number of Chinese cities have deployed trucks with large “mist cannons” mounted on the back in an attempt to disperse harmful particulates from the air, allowing residents to breathe more easily.

While this method of cleaning up the skies has proven rather localized, effective only within in an extremely small area, it has at least served to help officials meet their air quality quotas on paper.

Earlier this month, officials in the cities of Xinyu, Jiangxi province and Xinxiang, Henan province were similarly punished after they were found to have also ordered their workers to use mist cannons to spray away pollutants from monitoring stations.

With Chinese Premier Li Keqiang’s promise to make China’s skies blue again, local officials are currently under a lot of pressure to cut down on airborne pollutants in their localities. Improvements in air quality readings could mean a big promotion, giving cadres the incentive to get creative in the ways that they attain them.

Similarly, a number of different local governments have been punished over the last year for drastically inflating and overreporting their GDP numbers — a practice that experts have long assumed to have been going on in China, but that is only recently being exposed.

[Images via Btime.com]