Pollution intensifies with little hope of a cleansing storm


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SALT LAKE CITY — It's another red air quality day on the Wasatch Front as pollution intensifies with no specific end in sight. Visibility near the state Capitol this morning was down to a quarter mile as pollution readings reached the unhealthy range for the second day in a row.

KSL meteorologist Grant Weyman said there is a small storm front moving through this weekend. But it probably won't be strong enough to completely clear the air.

"We may have to go into late next week before we see a bigger storm," he said.

So, what we see is what we breathe, until a storm clears the air. What we add to this toxic smog stays here until that storm.

"Technically, an inversion is this warmer layer of air over colder air," Weyman said. "What it's doing is it's trapping what's underneath. Anytime you get warmer air above, the air below can't rise up. It needs much colder air for all of the pollutants to rise up in the air."

Until then, clean air advocates recommend that we find ways to carpool, combine trips, use public transit and cut down on idling.

The program director at Breathe Utah, Ashley Miller, said avoiding idling is a simple way for all of us to limit our emissions. Not only does idling waste gas and money, she said, it creates concentrated areas of tailpipe pollution, known as hot spots.

"That's especially bad in places like schools where parents are waiting to pick up their children after school or even dropping them off in the morning and stuck in a line to get out," she said.

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In Salt Lake City, idling more than two minutes is against the law.

"If you're sitting in your car for two minutes and still idling, hopefully you'll turn it off much sooner than that," said Miller. "I would say 30 seconds at most."

Recent data from Envision Utah shows 48 percent of the pollutants come from transportation: trains, trucks and our vehicles. Our homes and buildings generate 39 percent of the pollutants, and the remaining 13 percent comes from industry.

The most common and persistent bad information about idling, according to Miller? We need to warm up our cars for peak performance.

"That's totally a myth," she said, and your automobile owner's manual will back her up. "You can actually just get in your car and start up and it will drive just as good as if you warmed it up for 10 minutes, or 20 minutes or however long people typically warm up their cars."

Research shows the cold start pumps out the most pollution from our vehicles.

"We just can't rely on weather patterns to clear the air out for us," Miller said. "We need to do something now, and stop creating the pollution, and solve the problem."

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