When Salt Lake City official George Snow said that the Wasatch Front’s air quality issues could not be solved “in a single day or year, not by a single group or group of persons. It will take a properly guided, united and continued effort to solve the problem”—it wasn’t in response to Utah’s torrential growth in recent years, nor was it during one of our recent inversions or smoke inundations from climate-driven Western wildfires. That quote is from 1917 and predates nearly everyone and everything that’s grown up in the Salt Lake Valley since then.
This quote shows that Utah’s air quality issues have been with us for a long time.
New research by Logan Mitchell, affiliated faculty in the U’s Department of Atmospheric Sciences, and Chris Zajchowski, who earned a Park, Recreation, and Tourism Ph.D. at the U in 2018 and is now at Old Dominion University, traces the history of air quality in Utah from the mid-19th century.
Read more at: University of Utah