3.4.2.3 Public formal and informal market places
Public formal and informal markets are another potential source
of waste and neighborhood pollution. Recent evidence has suggested a close
relationship between the activities of the informal sector and the degradation
observed in the urban environment of Port-au-Prince (Howard 1998). The
so-called public markets contain unspeakable deleterious hygienic conditions
harmful either for the attendants or people living in their proximity. The
informal market places pack the downtown area of Port-au-Prince in a chaotic
manner and at a point that is impossible to delineate its extent. According to
Wargny (2004), everybody attempts to sell something. In the past,
Port-au-Prince had some market places. Nowadays, port-au-prince is a market
place, continuous, insisting, unstoppable, and obsessing.
Market features were digitized both as polygons and points. Yet
the list provided by the communal administration's office was not exhaustive.
Many spontaneous and dispersed markets are established along the streets and
generate tons of waste for which no recovery plans exist. Some of them are the
extended version of a traditional market whose capacity has exploded with the
astounding population increase. The nature of these commercial exchange sites
make it difficult if not impossible to delineate their physical extent and thus
to integrate them in a model.
After calculating the Euclidean distance from markets provided in
the SMRCS' list, point and polygon features were combined using the maximum
function within the single output map algebra tool, and were reclassified as
shown in Table 3 below:
Table 3: Pollution from
Market Places and Risk Levels
|
Threshold distance (meter)
|
Reclassified values
|
|
0 - 100
|
4
|
|
101 - 200
|
3
|
|
200 - 300
|
2
|
|
300 - 400
|
1
|
3.4.2.4 Hospitals and the main cemetery
Though there is not much theoretical support and previous studies
available for validation, another factor affecting neighborhood pollution in
Port-au-Prince is the major hospitals and the central cemetery. Not
integrating them into the model would result in ignoring an important part of
the specific environmental context in the study area. The conditions of
sanitation within and around the hospitals, and more particularly the
Sanitarium and the State University Hospital, make them hazardous and unsafe
places to be exposed for long time. This situation is aggravated first, by the
adjacent location of the mortuary to the general hospital often affected by the
common lack of power to adequately maintain the equipment; second, the general
belief and its concomitant negative impact that, since the type of service is
public, its management will be inefficient. Consequently the level of care
allocated is marked with negligence and falls far below the normal level it
would be in a private structure.
EPA (2005) provides a list of air pollutants that may derive from
hospitals even in normal operating situations. This list comprises mercury,
found for instance in thermometers. Mercury emits toxic vapors that go to the
lungs, and impact the kidneys, liver, respiratory system, and central nervous
system. It can escape into the outdoor through any openings, and even its
incineration doesn't prevent it from reaching the outdoor air. Polyvinyl
chloride, used in plastic products, is another source of air pollution even
when it is incinerated. It emits dioxin, which is a strong carcinogen that
hampers normal reproduction and development even in small amounts.
However, the environment in question in this study area is still
more complex than the normal conditions described by EPA, though quantitative
information is lacking. The sanitation conditions in the main cemetery are
precarious. Thus far the cemetery suffers from overpopulation. Often dead
bodies are exposed to the air for hours to allow new corpses to be buried in
the same grave or in the same hole. Moreover, cases of vandalism and stealing
of fresh coffins are reported, which also expose corpses to the air and
contributes to pollution.
For the cemetery the same distance approach was used to generate
thresholds separated by 100 meters from 0 to 400 meters. Regarding the
hospitals, first buffers from 10 to 100 meters were built in relation to the
comparative sanitation conditions at these facilities. Then the result of the
Euclidean distance on these buffered areas was reclassified into very high risk
(4), high risk (3), moderate risk (2), and low risk (1) using corresponding
distance thresholds of 50, 100, 200 and 300 meters.
| 
