Weather Report

Yesterday there was a wind storm in Salt Lake. It was disgusting.

When you think of Salt Lake, do you think of smog? People think of Los Angeles and think of smog. Ironically, I never noticed any REAL smog in LA. It was sunny and hot and tanned, you could see the brown on the horizon or blocking the mountains sometimes, but it was never so thick that I couldn’t see through it, and it was always limited to one level of the atmosphere. I grew up there, and while the smog would build up gradually, if it ever got too bad on the horizon, we always knew that it would blow away in the next windstorm, or fall to the ground in the next rain.

…Safe to say, I am acquainted with smog. In Salt Lake, air pollution is a whole different story.

I’ve lived in Provo off and on since 2003. Maybe I was too blinded by the young adult independence and intense social life, but I never noticed the air tasting like an industrial deep frier that has been used too much, or going for a walk outside and coming back with my hair smelling like dirt. I have worked in Salt Lake for 6 months, now, and have noticed those things and more. As I make my 37.9 mile commute every morning, I am welcomed to the half way point by coming over “point of the mountain” and into the bowl of soupy air. On a good morning, it just looks like early morning haze and blows smoke in from the ventilation ducts in your car. On a bad morning, you can’t see two cars ahead of you. “No, that must be just early morning fog,” you may be thinking to yourself, and maybe it does just burn off, but I wouldn’t know. The only times I step outside are during my drive in and out in the evening, and the two 15 minute walks I take, one in the morning and one in the afternoon. The air often tastes like old French fries.

I know there’s Geneva Steel that apparently polluted the hell out of Utah Lake, but when I think of Salt Lake, I’m not usually comparing it to Detroit. So where did all of this come from? It’s been explained to me that it’s something called “inversion.” The first thing that you need to know about inversion is that Salt Lake is actually in the Salt Lake Valley, bordered immediately on the East by the Rocky Mountains. This makes a lovely bowl with a densely packed eastern border that averages at a height of 11,000 feet. This allows Salt Lake to collect all of the passing pollution blowing out of such cities as Los Angeles, San Francisco, and Las Vegas.

I found an article in the Salt Lake Magazine that described it best for me

““Inversion” is a meteorological term that every valley dweller in Northern Utah knows and fears. A layer of warm air sits on a layer of colder air, slamming the cold down like a meat locker door. During January 1992, my first term at USU, there was a period of eight days where the average high on campus was 23 degrees and the lows averaged 5. It’s a deep, soul-sucking cold. The wind never stirs. Ice crystals wander amid stagnant air. Nothing thaws, not even a trickle.

And it’s gray. The sun does not, in any sense of the word, “shine.” It flickers like a dim bulb. In Cache Valley, where the tighter valley walls exacerbate the effect, there are times when you can’t see 50 yards. A grim smoke fills in the edges of your vision, made worse by the knowledge that every wisp from every tailpipe, chimney belch, cow fart or exhaled cigarette is floating in this toxic stew.

A prolonged inversion is a natural joke. The punchline? It defies Utah’s clean-cut, caffeine-free, low-calorie image. The Utah winter in the mind’s eye is snowcapped mountains soaring into clear blue skies, and besweatered families cuddling on couches in front of roaring fires while thick flakes fall in the moonlit night…. But each winter, for a few days it gets bad enough that the Wasatch Front and Cache Valley make the EPA’s most-wanted list. Children and the elderly are kept indoors. The curtain is drawn on the blue skies and snowy mountaintops and the roaring fires are extinguished by the Red Burn proscription. Utah routinely beats the smog capital of the world, Los Angeles, in this race toward the toxic.”

It gives me hope that the nasty inversion is going to stop eventually. After yesterday’s wind storm mixing the soup of dirty air, I’m pretty glad it’s snowing today. Maybe all that air pollution will come down to earth and all I’ll have to worry about is my feet.

Message of this post: visit Salt Lake in the summer only.

(The picture above is a combination of a Sunday when the pollution was bad, and the Wednesday following after a winter storm blew the pollution away)