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It’s scary to think like what type of long term damage its doing to all of us and especially everyone who never leaves the city
The state of Utah is one of the most beautiful places arguably in the whole planet.
Salt Lake City in particular is a worldwide destination for snowboarding and skiing because within twenty minutes of the city are some of the best mountains in the world. Brighton, Park City, Snowbird it’s all here.
Alan Matheson Utah is just a remarkable place for outdoor recreation, great lifestyle.
Ralph Becker We live in these spectacular mountains; we're in a valley, where the valley floor is 7000 feet below our high peaks.
Tim So yo we just spent basically an insane day shredding here at park city ,
literally almost not a cloud in the sky , spring conditions , i mean seriously a picture perfect beautiful day .
Its crazy to me to think that 20 minutes down the road when we head back to Salt Lake there's like toxic cloud hovering over the city.
Aaron Biittner That's the most overwhelming part about it , is you're coming down from the mountains into just like a sea of smog
Tim- Every winter something really crazy happens called Inversion. That due to environmental and pollution factors puts a gnarly haze on top of the whole city that makes it actually a pretty scary place to be.
Ralph Becker- Air becomes trapped in our valley and the cold air gets trapped under the warm air and so it creates this condition where all of our air it all gets trapped in here.
Alan Matheson The bruise on the prize we feel in Utah is this inversion season , something that's been around forever and will once these high pressure systems come in and put a cap over our mountain valleys. Trap the pollution inside.
Ralph Becker This goes back I mean there are stories and pictures , from the early 1900s
when everybody was burning coal but now, you know we face a different world.
where we've got increasing population , obviously vehicular use like we've never had.
Aaron Biitner Unless there was actually a real incentive or consequence for driving then
I don't really think people are going to change too much.
Ralph Becker Our asthma rates have gone way up .
Um people with respiratory conditions feel it on days like this
Aaron Biitner On certain days they've really urge you not to exercise in the city like don't go out running.
Don't go walking , I’m sure there's a lot of people in the city that don't even know to
leave the city to get out of it they just think they're in bad weather all the time.
Alan Matheson We can't control the weather patterns , and so there will be inversions and there have been since forever.
But we can control what goes into the air during those inversions.
Ralph Becker It comes from 3 primary sources, its industries. So the smoke stacks that we get.
it’s our vehicles which is our largest contributors to our air quality problems .
And its what's called area sources, its everything to heating your home
to bbq's , su cycle engines . You can go through a variety of things
Alan Matheson The state is taking unprecedented actions right now
Ralph Becker We're developing a whole new set of standards
Alan Matheson We've imposed strict new regulations, on industry that are going to reduce their emissions by thousands of tons a year.
Ralph Becker And then we've got to look at how we reduce vehicular emissions
and that comes from giving people good alternatives, we've got an incredible rail system here, we've got to
flush that out with a better bus system.
Alan Matheson Beyond that the governors proposed
a an unprecedented amount of investment in the state budget toward air quality.
The low hanging fruit has been picked.
Now we're looking for at those changes that are small. And it’s going to take hundreds of thousands of small little changes and victories to get us where we need to go.
Aaron Bittner The best thing you can do I think , personally as an individual is to get out of the city and get into the mountains and go enjoy yourself ,
you can't dwell on it to hard cause it’s just *** you off and not much we can do to it or do about it .
Unless we get together and like really make a conscious effort.