What It’s Like To Raise A Child In The Second Most Toxic City In America

t’s 2:30 am and my child is struggling to breathe. Coughs rack her body and a high pitched wheeze accompanies each breath in a tortured cadence. What started as the flu became croup and pneumonia, followed by bronchitis. Despite antibiotics and steroids, it lingered for weeks, ratting around in her chest. While she hasn’t coughed in days, I noticed yesterday she looked pale with dark circles under her eyes and a quiet fatigue that dogs her steps.

This is what it is to raise children in the second most toxic county in the United States. One bout of bronchitis can turn into an entire winter spent coughing, repeated chest x-rays and doctor’s office visits that produce little relief. And as a parent, the unrelenting sense of guilt that you may be condemning your child to a shorter life simply by living here.

Welcome to Salt Lake City, the beating, toxic heart of the second most polluted city in America.

Smog Lake City
When you think pollution, you probably don’t envision the quaint, orderly streets of Salt Lake City. You imagine Los Angeles, freeways clogged with cars and smog casting a gritty, orange haze across the urban sprawl. But Salt Lake City has a dirty little secret lurking just outside its squeaky-clean reputation as a nice place.

It’s called inversion.

Unlike good old-fashioned air pollution which usually worsens with the higher temperatures of summer, inversion happens in the winter. And it’s a tricky, complicated soup of weather patterns, atmospheric conditions, and geography that creates a perfect storm, forcing particulate pollution (referred to as PM 2.5 or PM for short) to concentrations that exceed national health standards.

In normal weather patterns, cool air circulates above, trapping warmer air near the surface. In Utah however, that weather pattern can become inverted. Cold air, fed by snowpack and a large, frozen lake that acts like a mirror, becomes trapped under warm air that acts as a lid. The valley also referred to as the Wasatch Front, is bowl-shaped with mountains on both sides that compound this effect, making it linger for days or sometimes weeks.

In January of 2017, Utah officially had the worst air in the nation. At one point, particulate levels rose to 59.5. For reference, red alert days, where all populations are advised to stay inside because the air is too dangerous to breathe, are triggered by a rating of 55.5 PM. Air is considered unhealthy for sensitive groups like children and the elderly at a much lower level of 35.5 PM.

In comparison, a 2015 study indicated Chinese cities had an average of 61 PM. That’s right. Utah can give China a run for their money when it comes to air pollution. Not exactly what Making America Great folks had in mind.

It is true that the Clean Air Act of 1970 has improved pollution in many major metropolitan areas across the United States by regulating automobiles and improving standards for energy efficiency and emissions across many different industries. Overall, Americans enjoy air that is 30% cleaner than a few decades ago, despite an increasing population and expanding urban sprawl. That’s a significant accomplishment.

But Salt Lake City’s rate of improvement has been slower than other cities. The state has failed to meet EPA air quality requirements for the better part of a decade. In 2009 and then again in 2016, environmentalists sued the EPA to enforce the standards aimed at clearing the haze in Southern Utah’s national parks. The state had rejected the EPA’s proposal and submitted a more modest solution that would have spared the state’s largest power provider, Rocky Mountain Power, from having to immediately update several coal-burning power plants.

The state’s proposal was rejected by the EPA in the summer of 2016 in favor of more aggressive regulation, but the election of Trump and the appointment of Pruitt has left the future of the agency in disarray. The EPA recently announced they would roll back standards on major contributors to air pollution, putting out advice to “ease the regulatory burden” for factories and power plants.

“This move drastically weakens protective limits on air pollutants like arsenic, lead, mercury and other toxins that cause cancer, brain damage, infertility, developmental problems and even death. And those harmed most would be nearby communities already suffering a legacy of pollution.”- John Walke, Director of the National Resources Defense Council
On the local level, the forecast doesn’t look much better. The GOP majority legislature has failed to invest in significant measures to improve air quality, cutting funding in 2016 for programs and opting not to update dysfunctional air quality monitoring equipment. In the 2017 legislative session, Utah’s lawmakers failed to pass measures that would have required emissions testing for diesel vehicles and refused to extend tax credits for electric cars. Further actions to shrink Utah’s national monuments and parks to allow for mining leases worsen an already bleak landscape for the state’s air quality.

And while national agencies and Republican state officials stand idly by twiddling their thumbs, thousands of Utahns fight to breathe through another winter.

The Kids Are Not Alright
Nearly 80% of Utah’s population crowds along the Wasatch Front, where the valley floor, once an ancient lake bed, rises to meet the mountains. Pollution pools across the valley and reaches levels that doctors believe contribute to community mortality.

Studies of healthcare providers and hospitals in the region show that ER visits increase 40% on days when the pollution is ranked as unhealthy. For those with chronic pulmonary disease, visits to the emergency room rise 90% during an inversion.

Utah Physicians for a Healthy Environment, a group of health professionals established in 2007, estimates that between 1,000 to 2,000 people die in Utah yearly as a result of from poor air quality. This includes not only those with respiratory illnesses like asthma but also those with coronary heart disease for which poor air quality is a contributing factor.

The American Lung Association gives Utah a big fat F Grade for unhealthy levels of ozone and particulate pollution, citing 38 orange days where the air pollution poses a risk to sensitive populations like the elderly and children. Levels are worse on the west side of the city, where lower-income residents cluster, sandwiched between the freeway and the sources of both small and large industry pollution.

One of the first health complications you might expect from elevated pollution levels is asthma. Utah does have higher rates of asthma than the national average, but most medical professionals agree that asthma is more common throughout the United States in the last few decades. 1 in 11 Utahns has asthma, which is about 9% of the population.