Jim Peron: Salt Lake City's pollution within acceptable limits

COMMENT

Columnist Barbara Sumner Burstyn wrote this week of her experience in Salt Lake City. What she wrote was shocking. She said a six-week visit to Utah caused her persistent shortness of breath. She sought medical advice but was eventually told that perhaps she might be imagining the whole thing.

She immediately went for a drive and said she found oil refineries "pumping virginal plumes that turn tobacco-coloured as they smother the mountains that ring this city".

She had a revelation: "It was the pollution that was taking my breath away."

Even more shocking was her claim that Salt Lake City was one of the most polluted places in the United States and that things were getting progressively worse.

According to Sumner Burstyn, this was the fault of religious folks and the evil right-wing. I am not offended when such folk are demonised, provided they deserve it. But Sumner Burstyn's claims did not strike me as tallying with the facts.

I never found Salt Lake City to be one of the most polluted places in the US. So I checked the pollution levels there.

The US Environmental Protection Agency keeps daily statistics for 200-plus major metropolitan areas on its website. The agency's air quality index measures pollution levels with ratings going from 0 to 500. Good is anything under 50; moderate levels of 51 to 100 might be of concern to "unusually sensitive" people who are cautioned not to exert themselves. Over 100 is unhealthy for sensitive groups but the public is safe; from 150 upwards things start getting serious for the public.

Sumner Burstyn gave the impression that Salt Lake City must be well above 150 on the air quality index. Not even close. It was under 50 and much of this seems vehicle-related, because outside the city the index rating drops from 43 to 9.

The Foundation for Clean Air Progress has lately praised Salt Lake City for its dramatic improvements in air quality over the past 20 years. In the early 1980s the city, on average, exceeded national air quality levels 11.7 days a year, which still made it relatively clean. It now averages one such day a year.

The foundation noted: "Between 1980 and 1999, a 91 per cent reduction in the three-year average number of exceedance days were observed."

It does not appear that things are getting worse, either. Salt Lake City is in a valley and the surrounding mountains can act as a barrier. In winter months the city experiences weather inversions, where upper warm air traps cold air below. There is no exchange of air in the city and pollution levels rise.

That is complicated because many people in the region use wood-burning stoves for heating. But such inversions, like the stoves, are a winter phenomenon.

Utah's Department of Environmental Quality says the number of inversions a year has remained constant but pollution levels on such days have declined considerably since the 1980s.

The inversion results from geographical and meteorological conditions outside the control of Utah. It is, therefore, more difficult to comply with Environmental Protection Agency standards.

Two-thirds of US metropolitan areas, according to the foundation, had "zero violations of the air-quality standard". Salt Lake City averaged one a year. That is hardly the apocalyptic scenario Sumner Burstyn painted.

Her column was incorrect and terribly unfair. She blamed the "upstanding, conservative, Christian right captains of industry for the degradation of this once remarkable valley".

It appears the medical advice she dismissed might have been correct; perhaps she was imagining her shortness of breath. On the other hand, maybe she didn't notice that the city is one of highest in the US at 5200ft above sea level. Locals say that lots of visitors have trouble adjusting to the thinness of the air.

One thing is sure: whatever Sumner Burstyn's problem was, it was unlikely to have had anything to do with pollution.

* Jim Peron is the executive director of the Institute for Liberal Values.