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SALT LAKE CITY — For one group of mothers, the inversion is personal.
The Utah Moms for Clean Air called an emergency meeting Saturday to discuss solutions for the Wasatch Front's dirty air. The advocate group encourages women to "defend (their) children's health" and take steps to clean up the pollution.
Children are especially at risk for ill effects of the inversion, as their respiratory systems are still developing, reducing their ability to fight infection and remove foreign particles, according to Halton Region.
Saturday, they discussed two of their initiatives: to develop a clean air pledge for national and state legislatures to sign and to create air quality committees at schools throughout the Wasatch Front, Utah and Cache Counties.
The committees would be responsible to create and carry out an "emergency action plan" for inversion days that would keep kids out of the dirty air and give teachers a break.
Jennifer Kious, a member of both UMCA and Utah Physicians for a Healthy Environment, joined the group for the first time Saturday. She recently moved to Salt Lake, but was shocked by the pollution she said is putting her children's health at risk.
"When you spend a lot of time around people who are ill, you come to realize that our health is our biggest priority and people who are ill would sacrifice a lot to not be ill," Kious, a physician and mother, said.
"That's what we need to realize; we need to sacrifice a little bit of convenience, a little bit of extra money to pay for cars that have lower emissions, things like that, so that we can be healthy. So our children can grow up in a healthy environment."
