Wednesday, December 11, 2024
Salt Lakers can ride Trax and Frontrunner to help clean the air during inversion season.
Urban Living
Posted By Babs De Lay on December 11, 2024, 4:00 AM
It's that season again. No, not Winter or the holidays but the Wasatch Front's "Inversion Season," which lasts from late November until February each year. It's a fact that dampens the sunlight and traps pollution in the air in many cities across the state.
Last week was particularly bad in the capital city, as you couldn't see across the valley for more than five miles due to the haze. It's one of the least-attractive aspects of living in Utah for people who might be considering moving here.
My memory tells me that the bad air hasn't been so bad in the past few years due to more snow and rain storms. But this year, this nasty visitor has come on strong.
What causes this? Simple: cold air gets trapped in our valleys due to poor air circulation and pollution and it accumulates until wind and/or a storm comes through. I haven't seen alerts on the freeway signs to take public transit, or UTA offering discounts to riders as they have in the past. But methinks the worse the pollution the bigger the need to stop driving—and UTA is a great alternative in our larger cities for travelers and commuters.
According to Kelley Blue Book, Utahns drive 15,243 miles each year on average. We have about 3.5 million people in the state, so that would equal 53,350,500,000 miles each year.
The local TV weathercasters used to call the inversion "The Haze" until they got enough complaints to finally call this what it is—pollution. Our car exhaust is a huge contributing factor to the bad air quality and we get all sorts of particulates in the air such as nitrogen oxides, ammonia, sulfur dioxide and volatile organic compounds.
For newcomers to the state, we also have Red/Green "burn days" that alert us when the Utah Department of Environmental Air Quality determines if you can burn wood or coal between Nov. 1 and March 1 each year.
Green condition means you can use wood or coal in your fireplace, yellow means people should eliminate wood and coal burning and red alerts mean the use of coal and wood fireplaces/stoves is prohibited.
Obviously, burning wood and coal adds to pollution and back in the 1800s and early 1900s we had worse air quality here than in London, England! In 1891, Salt Lake City enacted its first air quality regulations, issuing fines for polluters and requiring that devices be attached to furnaces to capture the smoke before it could go into the air.
The first major air quality study in U.S. history was conducted by SLC, the University of Utah and the federal Bureau of Mines. Coal burning was phased out when natural gas became our primary fuel in the 1950s, so our notorious 'pea soup' fog decreased substantially.
Let's do our part this season and drive less, take TRAX and Frontrunner when possible and pay attention to Red/Green burn days!
About The Author
Babs De Lay
A full-time broker/owner of Urban Utah Homes and Estates, Babs De Lay serves on the Salt Lake City Historic Landmark Commission. A writer and golfer, you'll find them working as a staff guardian at the Temple at Burning Man each year.
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