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Comment by denvaar | Hacker News Reader

I live in Salt Lake and most of the time when I mention this issue to friends or family it isn't even on their radar, but this is likely going to cause my wife and I to move somewhere else. It's too bad because this is such a great place to live and its where our family is at. We usually have a really bad inversion in the winter time, and it seems like the summers for the last few years have been filled with wildfire smoke. I'm sick of constantly worrying about the quality of the air I am breathing.

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I'm also from North of SLC. I once read that this area was originally called Smokey Valley by Native American tribes that roamed the area but who usually avoided the valley because of the smoke pollution. It has something to do with how air moves through the area protected by the mountains and the lake. That was before the industrial revolution. I'm sure that the quality of that smoke has degraded with the burning of fossil fuels, but it is interesting that the area has been known as the "smokey valley" for at least a couple hundred years.

Salt Lake County, Weber County, and Utah County all suffer from inversions during cold weather months, which is much of the winter.

Inversions are where a layer of warm air traps cold, polluted air inside the valley and air pollution accumulates because it can't go anywhere. I grew up in Utah county and I remember the Geneva steel plant was a huge source of pollution. In my environmental studies class we calculated that on cold weather days when there was an inversion the amount of pollution each person breathed every day was equivalent to smoking 3 cigarettes.

Even before internal combustion engines and modern industry the campfires alone must have given Utah valleys the reputation as "smokey valley" by the native Americans. This is not a new phenomenon - the geography of high mountains with lots of population causing pollution in the valleys causes it naturally.

Geneva Steel in Utah County was constructed for World War II steel production, but fortunately has been closed and its site remediated for a couple of decades now.

Wife and I moved down to Cedar City/Enoch area, it's nice here but airbnb is making rents horrible, we need a housing boom or something to lower housing rates but that's another issue and prevalent all over the state. The air here is much easier though, except sometimes during fire season.

We were in provo, and I like the cities up there, but I don't think we'll ever go back. I definitely wouldn't want to live there when the arsenic clouds kick up.

The giant dust storms are new too. I was just driven out myself and it was with a heavy heart, but I couldn't take the air quality anymore. I was there because I loved the outdoors, but there were just too many days I couldn't even be outside.

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