5 ms·

Toxic fog settles over Salt Lake City

30 points by ttar 14y ago

kephra 14y ago
This reminds me again at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Sheep_Look_Up http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Sheep_Look_Up The most frightening scifi I ever read because many of its predictions became true, starting with US voting for a cowboy actor as president.
seanmcdirmid 14y ago
I did grad school in SLC and they suffer from the same geographical/topological problems as Beijing: both cities are basically bowls trapped in by mountains on all sides, where wicked inversions often occur in the winter that trap pollution in with no relief until the winds blow in. Now for this from the article: > For weeks, industrialized cities in northern China have been dealing with bouts of sickening smog several times more toxic than Utah's. But by U.S. standards, Utah's pollution index is off the charts with readings routinely exceeding a scale that tops out at 70 micrograms a cubic meter. The EPA sets a standard for clean air at no more than 35 micrograms. 70 AQI, talk about first world problems! Right now in Beijing its around 90, and that is considered very good for us! Last night was 486, and I was crazy enough to go for a walk. Many of us laowai in Beijing get depressed in the winter because of the poor air quality.
- Volpe 14y ago
  > Many of us laowai in Beijing get depressed in the winter because of the poor air quality. I'm confused about the implication here. Are westerners (laowai) more prone to getting depressed from poor air quality? Chinese (native/migrant) aren't affected?
  - harlanlewis 14y ago
    There's surely some degree of acclimation that has much to do with how much time you spend outside. It makes sense a foreigner who (I assume) can hole up on bad days would feel the grodiness more acutely.
  - seanmcdirmid 14y ago
    I'm sure someone from Kunming moving to Bejiing would get depressed also, but someone who grew up in northern China might just see it as normal. Depression often has to do with standards and expectations, not necessarily the situation itself. Edit: or to say, its about the relative situation between the past and present. If the present has been stable, good or bad, then you won't get into a funk. For example, say you fly economy your whole life, its not great, but you are perfectly happy with it, then one day you get magically bumped up to business...and oh my god you can sleep on your 9 hour flight! But you can't afford to ever fly business again...so you get depressed whenever you fly economy.
  - bbuffone 14y ago
    As a westerner in beijing, i think everyone is affected the same by air pollution, though the difference is the "choice" of being here vs. not. You can see first hand the difference between the Beijing sky and that in Boston. http://sdrv.ms/10T8oof http://sdrv.ms/10T8oof I feel more depressed in the summer time when the air pollution is high. In the summer, the pollution feels smothering and then the oppressive heat of the city can be overwhelming. In the winter Beijing somedays just feels smokey.
    - seanmcdirmid 14y ago
      Beijing summer high AQI is nowhere near winter high AQI! Summer, you have rain, wind, and all the nice stuff that blows out the pollution. Summers in Beijing just feel bad because its hot and muggy + some pollution mixed in. We are all affected the same sure enough, but our* expectations might be higher since back home we think "90" is high, when in Beijing that is almost a clean air day. The rest of north and central China is pretty much the same, while the southerners and definitely the westerners (like, west of LanZhou) will complain about the AQI in Beijing just as much as the foreigners do. * There are many countries with problems as bad or worse than China. If you come from one of those countries, then Beijing might not seem so bad.
      - bbuffone 14y ago
        Agreed, about the pollution levels. My personal view is that the summer is far more depressing (heat, muggy, pollution) then the air in the winter. After 3 years in beijing, most Beijing people talk about the pollution far less, than housing prices, getting a Beijing hukou...
        seanmcdirmid 14y ago
        When we foreigners get together, we talk about pollution and the GFW since most of us don't hope to buy a house or get hukou :)
regehr 14y ago
A professor in atmospheric sciences at the U of Utah has a great blog and has been writing a lot about the inversions lately: http://wasatchweatherweenies.blogspot.com/ http://wasatchweatherweenies.blogspot.com/ I live in SLC. The air is indeed pretty ugly right now. On the other hand, my house is a few hundred feet higher than the valley floor and is mostly above the inversion.
- seanmcdirmid 14y ago
  Definitely helps to live in the foothills or on a mountain somewhere. Going to the U of Utah, it was a decent option.
- regehr 14y ago
  To give a few more details, an inversion is where there's a layer of air where it gets warmer instead of colder as you go up. For example, last night at the SLC airport it was 4 degrees F whereas at the top of one of the 11,000 foot peaks near Snowbird it was 34 degrees F. When we're in a high pressure system (i.e. nice weather) and solar heating is limited due to low sun angle and snow on the ground, this situation is stable. It happens in many valleys in the western US. This becomes a problem in a few specific valleys where a lot of people live (and drive cars). Usually we get a few weeks of this every winter.
richeyrw 14y ago
I live in SLC. It is pretty bad, though to be fair you get really pretty sunsets...
- michael_michael 14y ago
  And with a good strong wind you get the added bonus of smelling dead brine shrimp rotting in the great Salt Lake. I lived there for most of my life and will never forget that smell.
  - sievert 14y ago
    I know now where I will never live
pudakai 14y ago
I spent a year in Idaho years ago. I was really surprised at how smoggy/dirty the winter air gets in some of these Mountain west places that are prone to inversions. On top of that, woodburning in fireplaces/stoves is also really popular in some of these areas. I remember a few days in Pocatello where you could barely see to the end of the block.
thoughtcriminal 14y ago
I'm amazed by people's ability to rationalize why it's okay to continue commuting long distances and driving cars in general, despite the toxic smog that gets deadlier every year. Instead of making those hard changes like using public transit or living locally, I guess everyone is waiting for Elon Musk to save the world with his magic-mobiles. Go ahead, downvote me for telling the truth. I got karma to spare.
- ars 14y ago
  > Instead of making those hard changes like using public transit Actually diesel buses make more soot than cars. For this problem, public transit is not the solution. (Unless you use LNG buses.)
  - jonpeda 14y ago
    I like how you immediately contradicted your conclusion with the obvious counterexample.
    - ars 14y ago
      I like to be honest. But LNG buses are just not common enough, they apparently cost more than diesel ones so municipalities don't buy them.
  - khuey 14y ago
    On a per-person-moved basis? I'm going to call [citation needed] on that.
  - saosebastiao 14y ago
    This hasn't been true for almost a decade now...and even before then, all it took was a few cars (3-4) taken off the road for the bus to come out ahead.
  - agscala 14y ago
    What are you talking about? The idea is to reduce the total number of cars by getting everyone using public transit. One bus might make twice as much soot as a car, but the bus can bring a lot more than two cars off the road if people ride the bus.
ars 14y ago
Since the problem is soot they should ban diesel vehicles (unless they are very new super clean ones). So instead of encouraging mass transport they should reduce it. (Assuming they use typical dirty diesel buses.) Ordinary gasoline vehicles with catalytic converters really don't make much soot. Attempting to restrict those is not the best way to solve this.
brokentone 14y ago
Poorly written article from the AP. "...and want large employees to let people work from home." - Bullies who insist on no telecommuting? Ambiguous reference between the SLC situation and LA... "That's equivalent to a bad day in the Los Angeles area." Then the reading was 130, the EPA limit is 35, but the scale tops out at 70? I'm now more confused after reading this article. 1/5 would not read again.
austenallred 14y ago
I live in Provo (just south of Salt Lake City), and I start coughing every time I go outside. I'm fine as long as i'm indoors. The last time I felt like this is when I lived in Beijing for a stint, and before that when I lived in a couple mining towns in Ukraine with no regard for pollution control (Mariupol and Gorlovka). It's not surprising though, Utah is the perfect storm for this type of pollution. Surrounded by mountains on all sides, the inversions that come every winter drop the temperature by 10 degrees and trap bad air in. Combine that with awful transport (a result of a history of conservatism, a balanced state budget, and towns being spread out as soon as you leave the major freeway), and it's not surprising that this happens pretty much every year. I'm just grateful Geneva sold off the steel refinery in Orem; the air is noticeably cleaner.
VaedaStrike 14y ago
Geographically we share the sink hole status with New Orleans, only instead of water it's dirty air that our geography grants us. One thing that drives me nuts about these superficial looks at this is that the inversion would happen to us even if we shut down the refineries and stopped driving. In fact Utah air quality has been steadily improving even while our geography remains the same and our population rises and the number of cars on the road go up. Stories like this are so easy to take out of context. We have the single largest pollution producing facility, the Bingham Mine/Smelting facilities. Yet when that's reported I don't see people mention that it produces the cleanest copper, environmentally speaking, of any other facility on the planet. Happily we're not burning coal to keep our homes warm any more, but back when we did Utah's air was far dirtier. I worked for a time as housekeeping in the Salt Lake Temple and the stories I heard were almost legendary of the kind of cleaning they'd have to do in there back when coal burning was THE way to heat homes in the winter. But good reporting, in terms of getting readership up and people turning their heads, demands things get taken out of context. And for those people big on Public Transit they need to know that it's all a placebo. It's not actually better for the environment. Just because you don't see smoke coming out of the actual car you're ridding in doesn't mean it's not being pumped out somewhere else down the line, and to add to that you need to realize all the pollution incidental to building and maintaining the infrastructure of whatever your chosen transit option is. Many also don't realize that in a place as sparsely populated as Utah (speaking here relative to actual big cities) public transit is even more illusory. Presently, for example, I'm here in Lima Peru. If there's ever a city that embraced public transit it's Lima. Yet for significant portions of the day a great many busses and combis and all types of public transit run relatively empty. Yes, commutes and weekends the economies of mass transit seem dead obvious, but don't fall for confirmation bias, if your public transit is available all day long then any benefits you get from packing busses or trains full at commute time has to be balanced out from the costs, fiscal and pollution and energy consumption wise, from the whole of the cycle. And if you bleed a lot of advantages in a city like Lima, Salt Lake doesn't have a prayer. I'd wager good money that public transit is lucky to break even with cars when it comes to pollution produced per transit cycle- if fiscal price is any indicator of impact on energy use and pollution production from any and all corners of the full life cycle of things.
bencpeters 14y ago
A BIG part of SLC's air quality problem is that we have so much industrial pollution in the area. Kennicott operates one of the largest strip mines in the world in the valley, and their operation alone accounts for ~1/3 of the air pollution. There are also a lot of oil refineries in the north SL area that spew pollution constantly. I agree that public transportation and re-thinking commuting is a good step, but it would be great to see some movement on the very controllable industrial pollution problems we have in a state with some of the most lax environmental laws in the nation.
- VaedaStrike 14y ago
  Ben here made my point right after I pointed it out. He brings up Kennicott's Bingham Copper mine but seems ignorant that pound for pound of copper it's the cleanest copper produced on the planet. He also seems to not address the reality that our geography would trap a lot of pollution regardless of where it was originally produced, simply by virtue of the valley's geography. I'm not against cleaning things up as much as possible. But do you really think shutting down the cleanest copper operation on the planet is a net gain for the environmental movement? Are we really okay with bad air as long as we don't directly produce it? How many of us have smart phones and computers (we are discussing this on HN are we not?)? How guilty do we feel about the pollution produced in 3rd world countries where much of the Rare Earth Elements used in them are mined? Please people, reconsider the degree of outrage simply because you can see the dirty air. Illusory and placebo environmentalism is not the means to a better world. We need to see things in a planetary perspective if we want to really address planetary problems, and being enraged about SLC's air quality in the middle of an inversion is like getting worked up about polluted water after watching Hurricane Katrina hit New Orleans. Sure the water is atrocious and it's a crying shame, but the water is likely no less polluted in any other metropolitan area hit by a hurricane, it's just the Geography is less advantageous to New Orleans.
- austenallred 14y ago
  At least we don't have Geneva Steel anymore. Man that was a nightmare.
fowkswe 14y ago
SLC, and every other major American city for that matter, is never going to solve their smog problems when they are built such that inhabitants REQUIRE the use of a vehicle to perform the necessary tasks to exist. Elon Musk might have a solution (thought I'm skeptical) but public transportation cannot to fix the environmental effects of urban sprawl.

30 points by ttar 14y ago

This reminds me again at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Sheep_Look_Up http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Sheep_Look_Up The most frightening scifi I ever read because many of its predictions became true, starting with US voting for a cowboy actor as president.

seanmcdirmid 14y ago

I did grad school in SLC and they suffer from the same geographical/topological problems as Beijing: both cities are basically bowls trapped in by mountains on all sides, where wicked inversions often occur in the winter that trap pollution in with no relief until the winds blow in. Now for this from the article: > For weeks, industrialized cities in northern China have been dealing with bouts of sickening smog several times more toxic than Utah's. But by U.S. standards, Utah's pollution index is off the charts with readings routinely exceeding a scale that tops out at 70 micrograms a cubic meter. The EPA sets a standard for clean air at no more than 35 micrograms. 70 AQI, talk about first world problems! Right now in Beijing its around 90, and that is considered very good for us! Last night was 486, and I was crazy enough to go for a walk. Many of us laowai in Beijing get depressed in the winter because of the poor air quality.

Volpe 14y ago
> Many of us laowai in Beijing get depressed in the winter because of the poor air quality. I'm confused about the implication here. Are westerners (laowai) more prone to getting depressed from poor air quality? Chinese (native/migrant) aren't affected?
- harlanlewis 14y ago
  There's surely some degree of acclimation that has much to do with how much time you spend outside. It makes sense a foreigner who (I assume) can hole up on bad days would feel the grodiness more acutely.
- seanmcdirmid 14y ago
  I'm sure someone from Kunming moving to Bejiing would get depressed also, but someone who grew up in northern China might just see it as normal. Depression often has to do with standards and expectations, not necessarily the situation itself. Edit: or to say, its about the relative situation between the past and present. If the present has been stable, good or bad, then you won't get into a funk. For example, say you fly economy your whole life, its not great, but you are perfectly happy with it, then one day you get magically bumped up to business...and oh my god you can sleep on your 9 hour flight! But you can't afford to ever fly business again...so you get depressed whenever you fly economy.
- bbuffone 14y ago
  As a westerner in beijing, i think everyone is affected the same by air pollution, though the difference is the "choice" of being here vs. not. You can see first hand the difference between the Beijing sky and that in Boston. http://sdrv.ms/10T8oof http://sdrv.ms/10T8oof I feel more depressed in the summer time when the air pollution is high. In the summer, the pollution feels smothering and then the oppressive heat of the city can be overwhelming. In the winter Beijing somedays just feels smokey.
  - seanmcdirmid 14y ago
    Beijing summer high AQI is nowhere near winter high AQI! Summer, you have rain, wind, and all the nice stuff that blows out the pollution. Summers in Beijing just feel bad because its hot and muggy + some pollution mixed in. We are all affected the same sure enough, but our* expectations might be higher since back home we think "90" is high, when in Beijing that is almost a clean air day. The rest of north and central China is pretty much the same, while the southerners and definitely the westerners (like, west of LanZhou) will complain about the AQI in Beijing just as much as the foreigners do. * There are many countries with problems as bad or worse than China. If you come from one of those countries, then Beijing might not seem so bad.
    - bbuffone 14y ago
      Agreed, about the pollution levels. My personal view is that the summer is far more depressing (heat, muggy, pollution) then the air in the winter. After 3 years in beijing, most Beijing people talk about the pollution far less, than housing prices, getting a Beijing hukou...
      - seanmcdirmid 14y ago
        When we foreigners get together, we talk about pollution and the GFW since most of us don't hope to buy a house or get hukou :)

regehr 14y ago

A professor in atmospheric sciences at the U of Utah has a great blog and has been writing a lot about the inversions lately: http://wasatchweatherweenies.blogspot.com/ http://wasatchweatherweenies.blogspot.com/ I live in SLC. The air is indeed pretty ugly right now. On the other hand, my house is a few hundred feet higher than the valley floor and is mostly above the inversion.

seanmcdirmid 14y ago
Definitely helps to live in the foothills or on a mountain somewhere. Going to the U of Utah, it was a decent option.
regehr 14y ago
To give a few more details, an inversion is where there's a layer of air where it gets warmer instead of colder as you go up. For example, last night at the SLC airport it was 4 degrees F whereas at the top of one of the 11,000 foot peaks near Snowbird it was 34 degrees F. When we're in a high pressure system (i.e. nice weather) and solar heating is limited due to low sun angle and snow on the ground, this situation is stable. It happens in many valleys in the western US. This becomes a problem in a few specific valleys where a lot of people live (and drive cars). Usually we get a few weeks of this every winter.

richeyrw 14y ago

I live in SLC. It is pretty bad, though to be fair you get really pretty sunsets...

michael_michael 14y ago
And with a good strong wind you get the added bonus of smelling dead brine shrimp rotting in the great Salt Lake. I lived there for most of my life and will never forget that smell.
- sievert 14y ago
  I know now where I will never live

pudakai 14y ago

I spent a year in Idaho years ago. I was really surprised at how smoggy/dirty the winter air gets in some of these Mountain west places that are prone to inversions. On top of that, woodburning in fireplaces/stoves is also really popular in some of these areas. I remember a few days in Pocatello where you could barely see to the end of the block.

thoughtcriminal 14y ago

I'm amazed by people's ability to rationalize why it's okay to continue commuting long distances and driving cars in general, despite the toxic smog that gets deadlier every year. Instead of making those hard changes like using public transit or living locally, I guess everyone is waiting for Elon Musk to save the world with his magic-mobiles. Go ahead, downvote me for telling the truth. I got karma to spare.

ars 14y ago
> Instead of making those hard changes like using public transit Actually diesel buses make more soot than cars. For this problem, public transit is not the solution. (Unless you use LNG buses.)
- jonpeda 14y ago
  I like how you immediately contradicted your conclusion with the obvious counterexample.
  - ars 14y ago
    I like to be honest. But LNG buses are just not common enough, they apparently cost more than diesel ones so municipalities don't buy them.
- khuey 14y ago
  On a per-person-moved basis? I'm going to call [citation needed] on that.
- saosebastiao 14y ago
  This hasn't been true for almost a decade now...and even before then, all it took was a few cars (3-4) taken off the road for the bus to come out ahead.
- agscala 14y ago
  What are you talking about? The idea is to reduce the total number of cars by getting everyone using public transit. One bus might make twice as much soot as a car, but the bus can bring a lot more than two cars off the road if people ride the bus.

ars 14y ago

Since the problem is soot they should ban diesel vehicles (unless they are very new super clean ones). So instead of encouraging mass transport they should reduce it. (Assuming they use typical dirty diesel buses.) Ordinary gasoline vehicles with catalytic converters really don't make much soot. Attempting to restrict those is not the best way to solve this.

brokentone 14y ago

Poorly written article from the AP. "...and want large employees to let people work from home." - Bullies who insist on no telecommuting? Ambiguous reference between the SLC situation and LA... "That's equivalent to a bad day in the Los Angeles area." Then the reading was 130, the EPA limit is 35, but the scale tops out at 70? I'm now more confused after reading this article. 1/5 would not read again.

austenallred 14y ago

I live in Provo (just south of Salt Lake City), and I start coughing every time I go outside. I'm fine as long as i'm indoors. The last time I felt like this is when I lived in Beijing for a stint, and before that when I lived in a couple mining towns in Ukraine with no regard for pollution control (Mariupol and Gorlovka). It's not surprising though, Utah is the perfect storm for this type of pollution. Surrounded by mountains on all sides, the inversions that come every winter drop the temperature by 10 degrees and trap bad air in. Combine that with awful transport (a result of a history of conservatism, a balanced state budget, and towns being spread out as soon as you leave the major freeway), and it's not surprising that this happens pretty much every year. I'm just grateful Geneva sold off the steel refinery in Orem; the air is noticeably cleaner.

VaedaStrike 14y ago

Geographically we share the sink hole status with New Orleans, only instead of water it's dirty air that our geography grants us. One thing that drives me nuts about these superficial looks at this is that the inversion would happen to us even if we shut down the refineries and stopped driving. In fact Utah air quality has been steadily improving even while our geography remains the same and our population rises and the number of cars on the road go up. Stories like this are so easy to take out of context. We have the single largest pollution producing facility, the Bingham Mine/Smelting facilities. Yet when that's reported I don't see people mention that it produces the cleanest copper, environmentally speaking, of any other facility on the planet. Happily we're not burning coal to keep our homes warm any more, but back when we did Utah's air was far dirtier. I worked for a time as housekeeping in the Salt Lake Temple and the stories I heard were almost legendary of the kind of cleaning they'd have to do in there back when coal burning was THE way to heat homes in the winter. But good reporting, in terms of getting readership up and people turning their heads, demands things get taken out of context. And for those people big on Public Transit they need to know that it's all a placebo. It's not actually better for the environment. Just because you don't see smoke coming out of the actual car you're ridding in doesn't mean it's not being pumped out somewhere else down the line, and to add to that you need to realize all the pollution incidental to building and maintaining the infrastructure of whatever your chosen transit option is. Many also don't realize that in a place as sparsely populated as Utah (speaking here relative to actual big cities) public transit is even more illusory. Presently, for example, I'm here in Lima Peru. If there's ever a city that embraced public transit it's Lima. Yet for significant portions of the day a great many busses and combis and all types of public transit run relatively empty. Yes, commutes and weekends the economies of mass transit seem dead obvious, but don't fall for confirmation bias, if your public transit is available all day long then any benefits you get from packing busses or trains full at commute time has to be balanced out from the costs, fiscal and pollution and energy consumption wise, from the whole of the cycle. And if you bleed a lot of advantages in a city like Lima, Salt Lake doesn't have a prayer. I'd wager good money that public transit is lucky to break even with cars when it comes to pollution produced per transit cycle- if fiscal price is any indicator of impact on energy use and pollution production from any and all corners of the full life cycle of things.

bencpeters 14y ago

A BIG part of SLC's air quality problem is that we have so much industrial pollution in the area. Kennicott operates one of the largest strip mines in the world in the valley, and their operation alone accounts for ~1/3 of the air pollution. There are also a lot of oil refineries in the north SL area that spew pollution constantly. I agree that public transportation and re-thinking commuting is a good step, but it would be great to see some movement on the very controllable industrial pollution problems we have in a state with some of the most lax environmental laws in the nation.

VaedaStrike 14y ago
Ben here made my point right after I pointed it out. He brings up Kennicott's Bingham Copper mine but seems ignorant that pound for pound of copper it's the cleanest copper produced on the planet. He also seems to not address the reality that our geography would trap a lot of pollution regardless of where it was originally produced, simply by virtue of the valley's geography. I'm not against cleaning things up as much as possible. But do you really think shutting down the cleanest copper operation on the planet is a net gain for the environmental movement? Are we really okay with bad air as long as we don't directly produce it? How many of us have smart phones and computers (we are discussing this on HN are we not?)? How guilty do we feel about the pollution produced in 3rd world countries where much of the Rare Earth Elements used in them are mined? Please people, reconsider the degree of outrage simply because you can see the dirty air. Illusory and placebo environmentalism is not the means to a better world. We need to see things in a planetary perspective if we want to really address planetary problems, and being enraged about SLC's air quality in the middle of an inversion is like getting worked up about polluted water after watching Hurricane Katrina hit New Orleans. Sure the water is atrocious and it's a crying shame, but the water is likely no less polluted in any other metropolitan area hit by a hurricane, it's just the Geography is less advantageous to New Orleans.
austenallred 14y ago
At least we don't have Geneva Steel anymore. Man that was a nightmare.

fowkswe 14y ago

SLC, and every other major American city for that matter, is never going to solve their smog problems when they are built such that inhabitants REQUIRE the use of a vehicle to perform the necessary tasks to exist. Elon Musk might have a solution (thought I'm skeptical) but public transportation cannot to fix the environmental effects of urban sprawl.