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Ed Yeates ReportingBased on one of the country's worst pollution scares two years ago, Utah's Cache Valley is ready in case it faces the same threat over the next several weeks.
Nobody watches the skies more than Cache Valley these days. Because of the unique topography surrounded by mountains, the air there can clog up faster and tighter than many other spots. Residents enjoy pristine air most of the year, but murky as it's becoming now - during inversions - the Cache valley is getting ready to switch on its pro-active attack.
Lloyd Berentzen, Director, Bear River Health Department: "We have a unique problem, but we also have a unique people and they seem to step up and cooperate, whether it's bus ridership, whether it's just deciding I'm not going to use my vehicle today, I don't need to. Rethink whether you need to take that extra trip."
Though it hasn't happened yet, electronic highway signs are ready to alert motorists to a change in the air and what they should do. In addition to the roadside warning signs, this year there will be solid colored flags going up on flagpoles, outside and inside schools, all over the cache valley. Again it's heads up for yellow and red air days.
These are not yellow and red burn days, but yellow and red air days - flags raised not after it happens but just before, so people can plan.
Surveys now show the folks in Cache Valley know what damaging particulates in smog can do, that when vehicle usage drops off like this, so does the level of that insidious particulate called PM 2.5.
Lloyd Berentzen: "That survey actually indicates that 50-percent of the people in the valley understood that, and if that's true, that's significant for us."
