CYPRUS yesterday woke up to a thick cloud of dust in the atmosphere, which sent scores of people into hospital and saw the cancellation of flights.
Head of the Meteorological Services Kyriacos Theofilou explained the dust had been carried to Cyprus by winds from Libya and Egypt. “The forecast says it should have begun to disperse by Saturday evening but it will remain in the atmosphere on Sunday and Monday, although it will be less dense. A low pressure system from the West will bring a new dust storm to the island on Tuesday.”
The weather chief added that, “all lower areas of Cyprus have been affected, with not so much seen over the mountains.”
He said it was uncommon to see this kind of phenomenon in Cyprus, “even though it has been observed with increasing regularity over the last few years”.
The dust is mainly made up of sand.
A doctor on the morning shift at Paphos Hospital’s Accident and Emergency Department reported around 25 people coming in complaining of breathing difficulties. She said that those affected were mainly children, the elderly and those with allergies.
“Patients reported a sensation of difficult or uncomfortable breathing or feelings of not getting enough air. We treated them and they should all be OK in time,” she said. She advised those in high-risk groups to remain indoors, adding that the dust posed no real threat to healthy adults.
A spokeswoman at Paphos Airport said the dust had caused an outbound flight to be diverted to Larnaca, whose airport chief, Antonis Lemesianos, told the Cyprus Mail that, “no problems have so far been reported here and everything is running according to schedule.”
A police spokesman said Paphos was the worst hit town, but no traffic accidents had been reported across the island by early yesterday afternoon as a direct result of the dust, adding that drivers faced difficult driving conditions due to very poor visibility in some areas.
The Labour Ministry’s Director of Working Conditions told state radio that, “the dust particles in the atmosphere are far more than usual, at two to three thousand milligrams per cubic metre.” Leandros Nicolaides also reported that the dust seemed to thicken at around eight o’clock yesterday morning, “according to information we received from four monitoring stations across the island.”
He urged people to stay away from open areas, where the dust was at its thickest.
A DUST storm (or sandstorm in some contexts) is a meteorological phenomenon common on the Great Plains of North America, in Arabia, the Gobi Desert of Mongolia, the Taklamakan Desert of northwest China, the Sahara Desert of northern Africa, Thar Desert of India and other arid and semi-arid regions. Such a storm is usually the result of convection currents created by intense heating of the ground. The air over the sand becomes hot, and rises. This creates differences in air pressure and temperature, and the cooler winds begin to rush in. The wind is strong enough to move dunes.
The dust picked up in such storms can be carried thousands of kilometres.
