Pollution has a Utah mom seeing red

It was the thought of a cigarette dangling from her baby's mouth that finally did it for Cherise Udell.

The 41-year-old mother of two learned last spring that simply breathing Salt Lake City's bad air on a red-alert day was equivalent to smoking a half-pack of cigarettes. Horrified by what pollution was doing to her young daughters' lungs, Cherise wondered, "What can I do?"

Eight months later, her quest to clean up Utah's air has turned into a full-time job without pay but with plenty of benefits.

"We're helping to extend our children's lives — that's the big reward," says Cherise, an environmental health graduate student who founded Utah Moms for Clean Air, a group that now has more than 700 members. "Nobody would condone a 6-year-old smoking. Why should it to be OK to do nothing about air quality that has the same effect as smoking? It's time we hit a nerve."

Hoping to get more Utahns involved in eliminating "red" days, Cherise wanted to share a Free Lunch chat during a break from caring for her two girls and researching new pollution statistics.

Already, her group has rallied against the construction of new coal-fired power plants in Utah — a large contributor to poor air quality. Now they're aiming to get more public transportation options for Utahns and keep the pressure on us to change some bad habits.

"There are so many little things that each of us can do that will add up," says Cherise. For example, why idle your car in the school parking lot or sit in a long line at the drive-up window? Turn off your engine at the school, she says, and go inside the restaurant to get your hamburger fix.

With children especially susceptible to pollution-related health problems, Cherise's group is also pushing to get diesel school buses retrofitted to run more cleanly.

"It just doesn't make sense to have buses idling in front of schools, spewing out smoke while kids are getting on and off," says Cherise. "Did you know that as things are right now, our children will have two years taken off their lives because of our bad air?"

It is certainly startling that Salt Lake County's air quality is worse than Los Angeles' during a nasty inversion. Relying on a brisk wind to push our pollution into Idaho isn't the way to take care of the problem, says Cherise. When merely breathing can cause heart attacks and respiratory illnesses, it's time to take action, rather than rely on another snowstorm to clear the skies.