I was in Washington, D.C. about 10 years ago when I heard my first unhealthy air alert on the news. They were actually telling people to stay inside as much as possible and not to exercise.
My first thought was: "Why would anybody voluntarily live here?"
Of course, I have the same thought about a lot of places. Last week, the Logan air quality was worse than Washington, D.C. It was, in fact, worse than just about any place. We had a PM 2.5 over 180. The official number was subsequently lowered due to calibration errors, but it was still twice the level defined as "unhealthy." And although it didn't break a record, it put us in an unenviable top 20.
PM 2.5 is a relatively new measure of air quality that is especially confounding because it includes three metric measurements that the United States prides itself in not using outside of the hard sciences and illegal drug trade. It's the average weight in micrograms of particulate matter sized 2.5 microns or smaller in a cubic meter of air. So, a PM 2.5 of 100 would roughly be one-hundredth of a milligram (there are 28,350 milligrams in an ounce) of particles, which are one-fiftieth the size of the smallest sand floating around in a space the size of a compact truck cab.
The mayor and the health department were put in the awkward position of asking residents to feel better about air that was only "unhealthy" rather than "very unhealthy."
The mayor was also frequently quoted saying, "There is nothing we can do." This may be true, but it ignores the past tense. "Was there anything we could have done?"
Logan isn't used to records or being called "unhealthy." For the most part we love anonymity and playing fifth or even sixth fiddle to other more recognizable red rock and Redford destinations.
I'm a 23-year resident and for the most part, an apologist for Logan and the other people who live here. We love our anonymity. The names Washington, D.C., Los Angeles and even Salt Lake City rolled off our tongues like we were spitting out spoiled milk. A lot of us ran away from dirty, crowded cities like those to live here. So, what happened? Outside of FOX News and campaign speeches there are no easy answers.
All the Mormons, gentiles, college kids, geezers and the 75,000 dairy cattle conspired to make this happen. Even the good green-hearted brethren contributed by burning wood to preserve fossil fuels even though there are no hardwood trees in sight. It took a whole village to make this gradually happen.
Like many towns, we tore up the streetcar tracks in the '50s to make way for automobiles and parking spaces. We fought starting a city bus line until about 10 years ago. We built a downtown bypass route and then quickly gave up on it because we didn't think the town was growing fast enough to need it. We gave up on bike paths because we thought we were too rural to need those. We started fencing off the canal paths that crisscross the valley because neighbors were worried about privacy and personal liability. We courted big box stores and chain restaurants because we had low self-esteem about what our town had to offer. All these new businesses went after the main street property and installed a drive-thru window for everything from dry cleaning to veggie wraps. We fought emission controls testing on our cars because we didn't want the extra hassle or cost. We decided that a view from the mountain sides was worth the commute. In short, we inhaled deeply from the addictive tail pipe of the personal automobile.
It was easy to convince ourselves that we weren't addicted, but really we are just so deeply in denial that we can't see it. Look closely; the devil is in the details. Everybody in my neighborhood shovels their driveways but only about half of them shovel their sidewalks.
Of course none of this makes us unique sinners on the American dreamscape. What makes us different is geography. The same things that make this a beautiful mountain valley conspire to create a lethal winter inversion soup. Nothing that comes out of our cars, furnaces, wood stoves, power plants and even our bucolic Holsteins leaves the valley during these winter inversions.
The spin control coming from the mayor and city council is that this is only an aberration. On average we have much cleaner air than most cities. Dissenters are made to feel like Roy Scheider in the movie Jaws fearing that we will scare away the tourists and students. Like that fictional beach town, Logan is beautiful most of the time, but sometimes it could kill you.
Dennis Hinkamp's column appears every Friday. Comments can be sent to dhinkamp@msn.com.
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