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The big lid is on our Wasatch Front kettle has again trapped pollution and pushed us into those infamous red-alert days. For some Salt Lake County families, the lingering inversion actually becomes worrisome.
When the air really gets bad, like it is today, you'll find Sam Sperry and his friends playing indoors. Sam has to, but even his two friends are better off staying inside.
The Sperry family is on a roller-coaster ride every time an inversion rolls in. Four-year-old Sam has asthma and congenital heart issues that don't do well in sour air. In fact, last year, the Sperrys rented a condo in Idaho just to get away for a while.
"It would be great if we could do that all the time, but it's not just reality, you know. We live here, we love it here, and our family is here. We love the Wasatch Front, but it's just hard to deal with the inversion," Sam's mom, Ellen Sperry, said. "You don't want to do anything that puts your child in a higher situation for risk"
The Sperrys love the outdoors, but they need to know conditions outside hour by hour. The state has those real-time readings on a graph on its Web site, but red or yellow alerts are based on 24-hour averages.
"We're in the unhealthy zone right now as we speak, but the 24-hour average is still below that threshold. So, in their definition, it's still considered moderate when outside right now. The air quality is actually unhealthy," KSL meteorologist Grant Weyman explained to us as he showed us the Web site.
Yesterday, Grant said we actually had about six hours where the air quality was way past unhealthy. However, the 24-hour average line still wasn't there, and the air was still considered moderate.
For their son's sake, the Sperrys would like a more user-friendly way to interpret this real-time line and localized conditions outside their door.
E-mail: eyeates@ksl.com
