[Keith R]

Originally Posted by LarrySpencer

Do you know if they completed this on their own, or if an independent auditor was used? What are the benchmarks, are they also listed within the report?

That's part of my concern about this data. The Dominican government rarely does their own health and environment studies; they use consultants (you can't really call them an "auditor" in this case) to pull them together, in this case, Abt Associates Inc., with assistance and review by a technical committee of government specialists and others such as the environmental health specialist in PAHO's office in the DR The consultants ran up against the same raw data and study constraints almost everyone else does -- for example, they say that they could not get good fuel quality and consumption data for the DR, so they had to make some assumptions and estimates on this critical starting point in the analysis. They also had to rely on some incomplete, short-term monitoring data and a couple of university studies. But it's really the only data out right now, such as it is.

That's why I say that a proper (rigorous, complete) and scientific diagnosis yet needs to be done. Why the Dominican government has not yet done it, I'm not sure -- cost, maybe? But then, there are plenty of multilateral sources willing to help fund the set-up of regular monitoring stations if the government asks for it, as has happened in many Latin American countries already. Cynics may suggest that DR officials haven't done the monitoring yet because they don't want to know the results, but I'm hoping that they're just being slow about getting to it...

It's been a year or two since I read the study, so I need to go back over it again in greater detail. But during a quick glance last night this passage popped out at me:

Hubo toda una gama de fuentes que no fue analizada. A lo largo de nuestra estadía en Santo Domingo y visita a Santiago, y la experiencia acumulada en otros países, se considera que los emisores más importantes son las fuentes móviles (ya discutidas), las plantas de generadoras de electricidad, las industrias de uso intensivo de energía (fabricación de vidrio, cementeras, refinerías, pinturas y solventes, etc.), y en el caso particular de República Dominicana las emisiones de las múltiples generadores de electricidad para uso comercial y residencial (y por supuesto industrial), debido a la poca confiabilidad del sistema nacional de abastecimiento de electricidad. Adicionalmente hay muchos otros rubros básicos que no pudieron ser estudiados. Uno de particular interés (por razones de contaminación, así como de impacto social) es la quema de basura en vertederos al aire libre.

Essentially, the study admits that many sources remain to be studied and estimated properly, but they consider the main suspects to be exactly the ones we have raised in this thread: vehicles, electricity generation plants, certain industries (I had forgotten to mention the cement plants and paint/solvent producers!), the plantas and open-air trash burning.