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Pollution has a Utah mom seeing red

Good lord, a month ago, breathing red-day air was equal to smoking five cigarettes a day--now it's half a pack? There's 20 smokes in a pack, folks.

How was the comparison of 10 cigarettes equals the impact of breathing air during a red burn day arrived at, what methods were used? Is this a methodically tested result or a guess? Could we have some reporting on this aspect?

To Give Me Convenience:

Good luck getting some sort of analysis on how the 10 cigarettes a day was arrived at. My experience is that advocacy groups, especially health advocacy groups (is this group a health group or an environmental group, really?), tend to use whatever means necessary to come up with scary numbers, as if they believe we're either too stupid or too corrupt to do anything with simple, provable facts. I may agree with their goals, but I think their methods are reprehensible.

I appreciated hearing about this group -- good work, ladies! I think that we all need to work harder to reduce the bad air quality in this valley. Salt Lake City is too pretty to view through a shroud of gunk! As for the half-pack a day comparison, I have heard this same analysis elsewhere, but it's obviously more serious if you spend a lot of time outdoors in bad air days.

There are four key facts that one needs to keep in mind when discussing air pollution in Utah:

1. Salt Lake's air quality is NOT worse than Los Angeles', nor is it anywhere close. SLC normally averages about 15-20 "unhealthy" days each year; LA normally averages twice as many.

2. The air along the Wasatch Front is actually CLEANER today than anytime in the past 50 years and is getting better, not worse. The reason we've had more air alerts the past two years is because they made the standard stricter, not because the air is dirtier.

3. Aside from a few weeks in the summer and a few weeks in the winter Utah's overall air quality is rated "good" by the EPA.

4. Utah has the lowest death and incidence rates of lung cancer and other respiratory diseases in the US. This is because Utah has the lowest rate of smoking. Despite the scary talk about babies smoking cigarettes, kids are less likely to die from lung disease here than anywhere else in the US.

True, we only have about 20 days where the air is equal to Los Angeles', but that's 20 too many, in my opinion. I have asthma and really notice the bad air quality in the winter and summer, when we get nasty inversions. Thank God we have been lucky this year to have so many snowstorms! Let's ALL do our part to keep our air quality healthy!

Thanks, Cheryl and the Utah moms for your work! I have a couple of additional ideas:

1. Timed lights on major roads. Stop-and-go traffic is one of the major contributors to air pollution. Lights can be timed to allow vehicles to travel at a constant speed (the speed limit!), thus greatly reducing air pollution. The direction of major flow can be changed from morning to evening.

2. Additional freeway lanes--not carpool lanes. For the same reasons as #1, we need freeway traffic to flow as smoothly as possible. Carpooling is great in concept, but does not pay in reality as much as opening that extra lane to everybody does (many studies support this).

3. Nuclear power--no air pollution, and it's big enough to replace coal-fired plants (solar and wind can't do that).

Clean air is a good goal, so we lose different business in the state that can not meet the goal. THen what, our children have clean air but no jobs and have to move away. Is this what we as a State really want? I would say this lady is not thinking ahead any father than her nose.

As a longtime resident of Salt Lake City (66 years), I remember when our air was much cleaner than now. There are simply too many vehicles on our roads -- we need more public transportation and people who are willing to use it. I walk whenever possible and ride my bicycle to do my part. If everybody would use other transportation methods at least once a week, what a difference it would make.

i just got over a bad case of bronchitis (non-infectious-- i didn't have a cold or anything) caused by air pollution (doctor's words, not mine)

What clean air are you talking about from back then?

Was it the air that was full of fine particulates from virutally everyone in the valley burning coal or wood to heat their homes in the winter?

Was it the thousands of tons of sulfur dioxide that an obsolete and completely unregulated Kennecott smelter poured into the air back then?

Was it the thousands of cars in the valley that produced roughly 100 times the amount of pollution per mile than today's cars, and burned leaded gasoline that resulted in airborne lead levels 100X higher than today's?

Was it the smog that contained carbon monoxide at levels 10 times greater than today?

It may be hard for some to believe, but Utah's air IS cleaner today than when I was kid growing up in Davis County.

I'm not saying air pollution is good. But the facts certainly don't support the hysterical "we're-all-gonna-die!" hand-waving by clean air activists.

I certainly wouldn't say that we're all "going to die" by breathing our dirty air. But I feel compelled to do what I can to help clean it up for my kids and future generations, not to mention vulnerable people who are prone to illness from pollution. What's wrong with being a clean-air activist? The alternative, I suppose, is to sit and do nothing, which is probably what the reader listed above does while he or she is idling in traffic....Thanks for your column, Ms. Free. I appreciate that you got us thinking about this very important issue!

I am not a mother and I will not be any time soon, but I understand the concern about air safety.
Last winter I was subjected to the inversion weather while endeavoring to run in the park by my school. Running a lengthy and difficult workout throughout the winter is one thing but when my throat and lungs started burning, I was short of breath and I was pestered by grating coughing fits I knew that something was indubitably wrong.
In an attempt to protect ourselves from the pollution, without throwing off our training, my team tried running inside. There is a reason that the administrators tell students not to run in the halls; there were hundreds of obstacles �people and objects alike- and breathing the air inside of the school was like breathing Elmer�s glue.
Running should happen outside, but unless the pollution gets better, it�s going to be increasing difficult to do so. Protect our city, our health and our future -- fight against pollution!

Hey you old times, get on line and tell these people how the air was like when we all burned coal at home to stay warm. Tell them how the hand would turn black from just using the hand rail up the stairs at an out side building. BLack due to the fall out of the coal being burned. It really is much better than it was when I was young. This younger people just do not know.

I'll tell you what this polution did to my family and then what I did to end it.

My children kept getting so many ear infections and illnesses that one have to have tubes implanted in her ears. I have light asthma and it was getting increasingly worse causing harsh cases of bronchitis that started turning to pneumonia.

So...I moved. I moved to a state with beautiful, clean air and my kids are so much healthier! I realize that's not an option for most people but I refused to live in that unbreathable air. Good riddance. I'll still keep up with what's going on through this paper, however! ;)

Medical fact: The Moms are right -- Air pollution's effects are analogous to tobacco's effects, causing a systematic inflammatory response in the arterial system that affects all organs and accelerates atherosclerosis.


Whether the air today is cleaner or not than 50 years ago is irrelevant....people TODAY are dying from the impact of breathing heavily polluted air and that is unexceptable. Thankfully, someone is standing up and saying enough is enough.

GO MOMS!

To Moose on the Loose:

How can it be irrelevant that the air is cleaner today than it was 50 years ago? That comment makes no sense. If the air is cleaner than it was 50 years ago, and if at the same time more people are having respiratory problems, then clearly there is something there that we are not seeing. That is highly relevant. It may be that the particular type of pollutants we have today are to blame for the increase, but we need to know that so that we can target the actual cause of the harm. Irrelevant? Goodness!

In addition, if the air is getting cleaner, then saying "enough is enough" to air pollution seems highly foolish. Go ahead and say "enough is enough," but only after you've determined what the problem actually is. You haven't bothered to do that, and the MOMS haven't bothered to do that, and I find that highly irresponsible. We will never fix important problems if people like you are unwilling to find out what the problem is before jumping on whatever emotional bandwagon happens to be rolling by at the time.

Its all Energy solutions fault just kidding although it probably is partially there fault we need to do something now not put it off like we do with everything else.

Utah's air can't be that bad. I mean that there are lots of cities besides Salt Lake that have bad air quality. Energy Solutions says that nuclear power must play a significant role in the new age, but nuclear power produces radiation, which is very unheathy. i think some people are just overreacting.

Energy Solutions says that nuclear power is going to help us. Nuclear is not going to help. What are we going to do with all the radio-active waste coming from the uranium??? Some people and companies are overreacting. Nuclear is definately not going to help at all.