SALT LAKE CITY — The sight of hazy hue skies of toxic air particles hovering over Salt Lake City means inversion season has once again returned. The question is now, is anything being done about it?
“During these times, we see air pollution concentrations almost double every day that we're under the inversion conditions,” said Bryce Bird, Director of the Utah Division of Air Quality.
Inversion fills the lungs with toxic air, and Bird says humans aren’t helping.
“We’re adding to the to the valleys each day. From our motor vehicles, from wood stoves, restaurants, anything that we do that produces, emissions is trapped in the valley with us,” he explained.
The view of the Wasatch Mountains is covered by a cloud of white air pollution.
“I think one thing you'll probably hear people say about air quality is there's really not any one single like, silver bullet that's easy to do right now because we've done a lot of the easy things,” said Dr. Jerry Kelly, an associate professor chemical engineering at the University of Utah.
The fight against inversion is a never-ending battle, but Kelly says the state has made some important moves over the years to help, especially when it comes to the main factor of emissions: transportation.
“Utah was actually the first Republican state to be pro-Tier 3 fuel,” Kelly said, which is much cleaner for the environment.
Bird says the move was encouraged with tax incentives, which worked.
“Now, all of our refineries are providing that cleaner Tier 3 fuel, which especially works well in the newest vehicles, but even makes our older vehicles produce fewer emissions,” said Bird.
He added that UTA is moving toward electric buses and the Salt Lake School District already operates some, which helps.
“We need to look at for every opportunity that we have to first, tie our activities to our air pollution, and then find ways to move to a cleaner way of doing things in order to keep the area vibrant, growing and not have the negative impacts that come from breathing high levels of air pollution,” he added.
Experts say Utahns need to constantly be looking for cleaner and more efficient furnaces, water heaters, and other more efficient systems.
“It comes to just making sure that we are keeping up with like the latest technologies," said Kelly. "The latest ways to reduce our mission and being efficient as our population continues to grow.”
