Geography is a major cause of our dirty air

The Broadway musical "The Act" includes in its signature song, "City lights," the following lyrics: "Country air means zilch to me, I won't breathe nothing I can't see."

If Liza Minnelli, who was part of the original cast in 1977, were to have come to Salt Lake City last week to sing this song, she might have turned and made a run for the country after all, gasping and wheezing all the way.

But of course, running to the country wouldn't have helped. In idyllic Cache Valley, where you certainly can "listen to the cricket, look at the rooster, smell the hay, and see the pretty little egg that the hen just laid," the air was so thick cows were bumping into each other.

Wasatch Front inversions are not for wimps. The air here, before a weekend storm was expected to bring much-needed relief, was not merely something you could see. It was something you could chew.

This annual fog fest is a public relations nightmare, and it is steeped in irony. The Wasatch Front is known for its picturesque valleys and stunning mountain vistas, with clean streets and views that stop only where the earth curves on the horizon. Yet last week we were told it had the worst air quality in the country.

Think about that for a minute.

That calculation was according to the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, and it was made before Barack Obama took the oath of office, for you conspiracy theorists. Martin Luther King Day was a good excuse to leave the state for some place where you could get a breath of fresh air, such as Los Angeles. According to the EPA, you could pick pretty much any place from Maine to Baja and it would be an improvement.

Every year about this time we hear about professors who are studying the causes of this mess and how we might be able to prevent it. Twenty years ago, professors in Utah County pointed to the one seemingly obvious source of smog, the Geneva Steel plant, and laid blame. The plant was causing pneumonia, pleurisy, bronchitis and asthma attacks, they said.

In 1988, a group of residents from the Provo area visited with the governor and made the assertion that most Utah County residents would rather have clean air than the jobs Geneva provided. That was a bold stand to take at a time when Utah's economy wasn't keeping up with the roaring '80s. But today Geneva Steel is long gone, and yet the dirty air remains.