Toxic fog settles over Salt Lake City | Hacker News Reader

Toxic fog settles over Salt Lake City

cbsnews.com

30 pointsttar57 comments

I did grad school in SLC and they suffer from the same geographical/topological problems as Beijing: both cities are basically bowls trapped in by mountains on all sides, where wicked inversions often occur in the winter that trap pollution in with no relief until the winds blow in. Now for this from the article:

> For weeks, industrialized cities in northern China have been dealing with bouts of sickening smog several times more toxic than Utah's. But by U.S. standards, Utah's pollution index is off the charts with readings routinely exceeding a scale that tops out at 70 micrograms a cubic meter. The EPA sets a standard for clean air at no more than 35 micrograms.

70 AQI, talk about first world problems! Right now in Beijing its around 90, and that is considered very good for us! Last night was 486, and I was crazy enough to go for a walk. Many of us laowai in Beijing get depressed in the winter because of the poor air quality.

> Many of us laowai in Beijing get depressed in the winter because of the poor air quality.

I'm confused about the implication here. Are westerners (laowai) more prone to getting depressed from poor air quality? Chinese (native/migrant) aren't affected?

There's surely some degree of acclimation that has much to do with how much time you spend outside.

It makes sense a foreigner who (I assume) can hole up on bad days would feel the grodiness more acutely.

I'm sure someone from Kunming moving to Bejiing would get depressed also, but someone who grew up in northern China might just see it as normal.

Depression often has to do with standards and expectations, not necessarily the situation itself. Edit: or to say, its about the relative situation between the past and present. If the present has been stable, good or bad, then you won't get into a funk.

For example, say you fly economy your whole life, its not great, but you are perfectly happy with it, then one day you get magically bumped up to business...and oh my god you can sleep on your 9 hour flight! But you can't afford to ever fly business again...so you get depressed whenever you fly economy.

As a westerner in beijing, i think everyone is affected the same by air pollution, though the difference is the "choice" of being here vs. not.

You can see first hand the difference between the Beijing sky and that in Boston. http://sdrv.ms/10T8oof

I feel more depressed in the summer time when the air pollution is high. In the summer, the pollution feels smothering and then the oppressive heat of the city can be overwhelming.

In the winter Beijing somedays just feels smokey.

Beijing summer high AQI is nowhere near winter high AQI! Summer, you have rain, wind, and all the nice stuff that blows out the pollution. Summers in Beijing just feel bad because its hot and muggy + some pollution mixed in.

We are all affected the same sure enough, but our* expectations might be higher since back home we think "90" is high, when in Beijing that is almost a clean air day. The rest of north and central China is pretty much the same, while the southerners and definitely the westerners (like, west of LanZhou) will complain about the AQI in Beijing just as much as the foreigners do.

* There are many countries with problems as bad or worse than China. If you come from one of those countries, then Beijing might not seem so bad.

Agreed, about the pollution levels. My personal view is that the summer is far more depressing (heat, muggy, pollution) then the air in the winter. After 3 years in beijing, most Beijing people talk about the pollution far less, than housing prices, getting a Beijing hukou...

When we foreigners get together, we talk about pollution and the GFW since most of us don't hope to buy a house or get hukou :)

A BIG part of SLC's air quality problem is that we have so much industrial pollution in the area. Kennicott operates one of the largest strip mines in the world in the valley, and their operation alone accounts for ~1/3 of the air pollution. There are also a lot of oil refineries in the north SL area that spew pollution constantly.

I agree that public transportation and re-thinking commuting is a good step, but it would be great to see some movement on the very controllable industrial pollution problems we have in a state with some of the most lax environmental laws in the nation.

Ben here made my point right after I pointed it out. He brings up Kennicott's Bingham Copper mine but seems ignorant that pound for pound of copper it's the cleanest copper produced on the planet.

He also seems to not address the reality that our geography would trap a lot of pollution regardless of where it was originally produced, simply by virtue of the valley's geography.

I'm not against cleaning things up as much as possible. But do you really think shutting down the cleanest copper operation on the planet is a net gain for the environmental movement? Are we really okay with bad air as long as we don't directly produce it? How many of us have smart phones and computers (we are discussing this on HN are we not?)? How guilty do we feel about the pollution produced in 3rd world countries where much of the Rare Earth Elements used in them are mined?

Please people, reconsider the degree of outrage simply because you can see the dirty air. Illusory and placebo environmentalism is not the means to a better world. We need to see things in a planetary perspective if we want to really address planetary problems, and being enraged about SLC's air quality in the middle of an inversion is like getting worked up about polluted water after watching Hurricane Katrina hit New Orleans. Sure the water is atrocious and it's a crying shame, but the water is likely no less polluted in any other metropolitan area hit by a hurricane, it's just the Geography is less advantageous to New Orleans.

At least we don't have Geneva Steel anymore. Man that was a nightmare.

I live in Provo (just south of Salt Lake City), and I start coughing every time I go outside. I'm fine as long as i'm indoors. The last time I felt like this is when I lived in Beijing for a stint, and before that when I lived in a couple mining towns in Ukraine with no regard for pollution control (Mariupol and Gorlovka).

It's not surprising though, Utah is the perfect storm for this type of pollution. Surrounded by mountains on all sides, the inversions that come every winter drop the temperature by 10 degrees and trap bad air in. Combine that with awful transport (a result of a history of conservatism, a balanced state budget, and towns being spread out as soon as you leave the major freeway), and it's not surprising that this happens pretty much every year.

I'm just grateful Geneva sold off the steel refinery in Orem; the air is noticeably cleaner.

Since the problem is soot they should ban diesel vehicles (unless they are very new super clean ones).

So instead of encouraging mass transport they should reduce it. (Assuming they use typical dirty diesel buses.)

Ordinary gasoline vehicles with catalytic converters really don't make much soot. Attempting to restrict those is not the best way to solve this.

A professor in atmospheric sciences at the U of Utah has a great blog and has been writing a lot about the inversions lately:

http://wasatchweatherweenies.blogspot.com/

I live in SLC. The air is indeed pretty ugly right now. On the other hand, my house is a few hundred feet higher than the valley floor and is mostly above the inversion.

Definitely helps to live in the foothills or on a mountain somewhere. Going to the U of Utah, it was a decent option.

To give a few more details, an inversion is where there's a layer of air where it gets warmer instead of colder as you go up. For example, last night at the SLC airport it was 4 degrees F whereas at the top of one of the 11,000 foot peaks near Snowbird it was 34 degrees F.

When we're in a high pressure system (i.e. nice weather) and solar heating is limited due to low sun angle and snow on the ground, this situation is stable. It happens in many valleys in the western US. This becomes a problem in a few specific valleys where a lot of people live (and drive cars). Usually we get a few weeks of this every winter.

I live in SLC. It is pretty bad, though to be fair you get really pretty sunsets...

And with a good strong wind you get the added bonus of smelling dead brine shrimp rotting in the great Salt Lake. I lived there for most of my life and will never forget that smell.

I know now where I will never live

Poorly written article from the AP. "...and want large employees to let people work from home." - Bullies who insist on no telecommuting?

Ambiguous reference between the SLC situation and LA... "That's equivalent to a bad day in the Los Angeles area."

Then the reading was 130, the EPA limit is 35, but the scale tops out at 70?

I'm now more confused after reading this article. 1/5 would not read again.

SLC, and every other major American city for that matter, is never going to solve their smog problems when they are built such that inhabitants REQUIRE the use of a vehicle to perform the necessary tasks to exist.

Elon Musk might have a solution (thought I'm skeptical) but public transportation cannot to fix the environmental effects of urban sprawl.

I spent a year in Idaho years ago. I was really surprised at how smoggy/dirty the winter air gets in some of these Mountain west places that are prone to inversions.

On top of that, woodburning in fireplaces/stoves is also really popular in some of these areas. I remember a few days in Pocatello where you could barely see to the end of the block.

Geographically we share the sink hole status with New Orleans, only instead of water it's dirty air that our geography grants us. One thing that drives me nuts about these superficial looks at this is that the inversion would happen to us even if we shut down the refineries and stopped driving. In fact Utah air quality has been steadily improving even while our geography remains the same and our population rises and the number of cars on the road go up.

Stories like this are so easy to take out of context. We have the single largest pollution producing facility, the Bingham Mine/Smelting facilities. Yet when that's reported I don't see people mention that it produces the cleanest copper, environmentally speaking, of any other facility on the planet.

Happily we're not burning coal to keep our homes warm any more, but back when we did Utah's air was far dirtier.

I worked for a time as housekeeping in the Salt Lake Temple and the stories I heard were almost legendary of the kind of cleaning they'd have to do in there back when coal burning was THE way to heat homes in the winter.

But good reporting, in terms of getting readership up and people turning their heads, demands things get taken out of context.

And for those people big on Public Transit they need to know that it's all a placebo. It's not actually better for the environment. Just because you don't see smoke coming out of the actual car you're ridding in doesn't mean it's not being pumped out somewhere else down the line, and to add to that you need to realize all the pollution incidental to building and maintaining the infrastructure of whatever your chosen transit option is. Many also don't realize that in a place as sparsely populated as Utah (speaking here relative to actual big cities) public transit is even more illusory. Presently, for example, I'm here in Lima Peru. If there's ever a city that embraced public transit it's Lima. Yet for significant portions of the day a great many busses and combis and all types of public transit run relatively empty. Yes, commutes and weekends the economies of mass transit seem dead obvious, but don't fall for confirmation bias, if your public transit is available all day long then any benefits you get from packing busses or trains full at commute time has to be balanced out from the costs, fiscal and pollution and energy consumption wise, from the whole of the cycle. And if you bleed a lot of advantages in a city like Lima, Salt Lake doesn't have a prayer. I'd wager good money that public transit is lucky to break even with cars when it comes to pollution produced per transit cycle- if fiscal price is any indicator of impact on energy use and pollution production from any and all corners of the full life cycle of things.

This reminds me again at

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Sheep_Look_Up

The most frightening scifi I ever read because many of its predictions became true, starting with US voting for a cowboy actor as president.

I'm amazed by people's ability to rationalize why it's okay to continue commuting long distances and driving cars in general, despite the toxic smog that gets deadlier every year.

Instead of making those hard changes like using public transit or living locally, I guess everyone is waiting for Elon Musk to save the world with his magic-mobiles.

Go ahead, downvote me for telling the truth. I got karma to spare.

> Instead of making those hard changes like using public transit

Actually diesel buses make more soot than cars. For this problem, public transit is not the solution. (Unless you use LNG buses.)

I like how you immediately contradicted your conclusion with the obvious counterexample.

I like to be honest.

But LNG buses are just not common enough, they apparently cost more than diesel ones so municipalities don't buy them.

On a per-person-moved basis? I'm going to call [citation needed] on that.

This hasn't been true for almost a decade now...and even before then, all it took was a few cars (3-4) taken off the road for the bus to come out ahead.

What are you talking about? The idea is to reduce the total number of cars by getting everyone using public transit. One bus might make twice as much soot as a car, but the bus can bring a lot more than two cars off the road if people ride the bus.

Buses make about 150 to 250 times as much soot. Not twice as much. Old buses granted. Newer ones are much better.

Have you been reading research papers from the 1950's? If you get on any bus anywhere in the US, you are virtually guaranteed that the bus is less than 10 years old. The average replacement time for Municipal buses is 7 years...10 years with complete engine replacement.

I was driving behind a bus in the US just last week - every time the bus accelerated a huge cloud of black smoke poured out of it.

Yes, new buses are good. But there are still plenty of old ones. (And this one didn't look old.)

Ah yes, we should go ahead with a ban on public transportation due to a fucking anecdote. You and my former boss would get along quite well.

I guess you are not as secure in your beliefs as you thought if you need to resort to swearing. You thought buses are modern and clean, and when you discover different you swear?

Diesel is very polluting compared to gasoline and I hate it. And stop/start diesel is the worst. So despite its great reputation public buses are not the automatic win they are made out to be.

They aren't beliefs. And yes, I have a tendency to curse when people advocate for very stupid policies using ideas that can be refuted in less than 5 minutes on Google.

I did do some google searches first.

Buses help with traffic and CO2, they do not help with soot. And the city in this article is having trouble with soot.

It would be wonderful if all buses were LNG, then there'd be little drawbacks. But right now they aren't, and because LNG is more expensive cities are buying diesel instead.

PS. In general cursing means you acknowledge your position is incorrect but you wish to use bluster to defend it anyway. It makes little difference if you don't intend this meaning - this is the meaning that is transmitted.

In general, being wrong makes you wrong. It makes you more wrong when you tell someone who is right that they are wrong. Soot per passenger hasn't been anywhere near car levels for over a decade. You have to go back past the 1990s to find buses that fare worse than cars on per passenger soot emissions. In 2007, diesel soot emissions were regulated to similar standards as gasoline vehicles. Stop being wrong if you want to be right.

Welcome to HN. Where we state opinions as fact and anecdotes as truth, usually with some hand wavey out in case we're called on BS. :)

A puff of smoke larger than the combined smoke produced by 55 cars? (http://www.mahalo.com/answers/is-there-a-seating-chart-provi...)

As long as we are comparing apples to grenades, a 20 yro bus with hardly any emissions equipment produces about 200 times soot as a new car with modern emissions. Its one problem we are dealing with in Beijing, that some of the older buses are so utterly primitive that they do more harm than good. Thankfully, these are going away.

Beijing is quickly moving to battery-drawn electric buses (not to mention traditional electric trolley buses). LNG is another solution, but for some reason, electric is catching on here (maybe b/c a lack of natural gas when compared to the states?)

Have you seen the public transportation in Utah? We got a commuter rail train in 2002 for the olympics, which was pretty much limited to a small area in downtown Salt Lake, and then a straight line down through sandy. Then a few years ago we got Front Runner, which is a somewhat fast commuter train between Ogden and salt lake, but which costs somewhere around $250/month last time I checked.

Buses are OK, about as good of a system as you would expect buses to be, but if you are looking to go from where I live to salt lake you are probably looking at an hour to an hour and a half, which seems pretty good when you consider that it takes 45 minutes - 60 minutes on Front Runner (30 miles).

If you're looking to go to SLC frequently, perhaps living so far away is part of the problem thoughtcriminal is speaking of. Nothing on you personally, this is a society-wide problem.

That's the problem: I don't go to SLC very often. I work in Centerville which is 15 miles away from my house. The inversion does not affect just Salt Lake; it affects the entire Wasatch Front.

All the pollution from the entire area just aggregates into a massive inversion.

I'm pretty amazed someone would claim that Trax is only limited to a small area of downtown Salt Lake.

It is. The only cross line is up 4th South. I mentioned there's a fairly long straight line down through sandy, but stations are more sparse, and misses the majority of salt lake.

Aerial Map: https://www.google.com/maps/ms?ie=UTF8&oe=UTF8&msa=0...

True that the Wasatch valley isn't sufficiently dense enough for public transit to be very effective, but they sure are trying! If you live in SLC and commute to the U, you are good to go, and I hear the airport line will be open (finally) soon enough, but I haven't been back in 7+ years.

The valley really needs to build up some density to make transit really work, but its difficult with all that land available + a conservative Republican state government (along with the people who vote for that government).

Indeed. +darrenkopp missed the Mid-Jordan line, the West Valley line (both currently operational), the airport line (opening in April) and the Draper line (also opening in 2013). These are mostly east-west lines. Also not included is the Sugar House street car line.

SLC mayor Ralph Becker says, "by the end of 2013, we will have witnessed the largest expansion of an urban rail system in the nation." [1]

"70 miles in 7 years" seems pretty ambitious to me. [2]

[1] - http://www.sltrib.com/sltrib/news/55680450-78/salt-lake-beck...

[2] - http://www.rideuta.com/mc/?page=Projects-Frontlines2015

A monthly premium pass (for riding buses, Trax, and FrontRunner) is only $190 per month, which seems fairly reasonable.

If you are commuting to/from downtown SLC, public transit is actually somewhat reasonable - I live in the southwest end of the valley and it is only maybe 50 minutes vs 35 to drive in ideal conditions. The bigger problems are:

1) The trains don't run nearly often enough. If you happen to miss one or need to go at a non-peak time, it is going to be really inconvenient.

2) Not only does much of our population live in suburbs, a large amount of jobs are located outside of downtown, too. In that case, a 20 minute commute by car can easily be a 1.5 - 2 hour public transit commute - I can drive to work in about 25 minutes, but according to UTA, the most optimal route by bus/Trax would take 1:30.

The way we've situated things here is pretty hostile to mass transit, but I'm glad we're at least making slow progress.

I'm just curious if you're aware how much money beyond that 250 a month is subsidized by federal money? You seem to imply that the cost is outrageous to expect people to pay, and I'd agree, yet the irony is that few things are as insanely subsidized as FrontRunner and TRAX (Utah's light rail system). TRAX has a per rider subsidy, if you factor in construction cost and maintenance, of 6-7 dollars. So if the people were actually paying full price for just ridding the light rail they'd be dishing out about 22 dollars for a two way trip. If they were smart they'd never have built light rail, but rather have taken that same money and quadrupled the whole bus system in Utah to actually give us a transit system that was actually responsive to the transit needs of our population. They would have moved more people, displaced more cars, and not have an absurdly 'tightly coupled' infrastructure where a single technological failure shuts down entire valley transit lines. But people see electrical trains, feel and see a smooth ride that can accelerate really fast and, to the best of their discernment isn't 'dirty'. And since they're protected from the real cost of the system they have illusions about it's capacity to cure traffic woes and save the planet. Never mind that when Utah was growing full tilt the number of new cars on it's roads replaced what TRAX's entire network managed to replace after hundreds of millions of dollars of investment.

Here's another interesting fact. When I looked into Front Runner's costs (which relative to other faster trains is relatively inexpensive) and did the math to spread it over the population for whom it was moving their commute off the road and found that the costs equated to over 50,000 dollars per rider. That's to say that we could have bought everyone a nice hybrid and we would have done likely a better job for the environment, for less money, and not have had to extend a rather limited and fragile infrastructure.

Trains make no sense, not even in Japan nor Europe. Look at the actual numbers, whether it's the fiscal costs or the total environmental costs of the system and it's support systems compared to their equivalents in a trainless world.

I'm saying that $190 is a decent amount of money for a lot of people along the wasatch front, especially when comparing it to just driving, ergo why it is likely that you see so many people driving instead of using public transportation which is the response to the root comment.

Not even in Japan or Europe? Have you really done the math, or are you extrapolating from a single data point? The costs of building rails and running a train are called fixed costs...cost per rider is inverse to the number of riders. That means that with higher ridership, cost per person decreases.

Don't believe me? The Calgary CTrain has costs not much different than TRAX. Operating costs, including depreciation, are $0.30 per rider...making the system profitable enough to subsidize the more suburban bus system. Why? Because they have 5x the ridership.

Don't be obtuse.

You don't know how pricing infrastructure works.

Just because Utah doesn't know how to run public transit doesn't mean no one else can and do so with decent financials.

I'm amazed by people's stupidity in continuing to advocate solutions that just don't work. And hopeful for the future of electric and hybrid cars, which will do a lot to reduce this problem. Although, judging from the comments, it sounds like a pretty large amount of the problem has nothing to do with commuters.

Except the air in most places has been getting cleaner, even with more vehicles on the road. First Stage smog alerts on Los Angeles, for example, used to be something that happened every few days. Now, they happen at most every few years. Yes, there is work to be done, but your mix of ignorance and outright lies doesn't help. At all.

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