Coming Up for Air
Art: David Meikle
More often than desired these days, a thin, gauze-like haze hangs over the Snyderville Basin on still, winter mornings. It’s an unwelcome reminder that this part of our town has earned bedroom-community status for the Salt Lake valley. As the basin’s thousands of residents wake to another day, flickering furnaces come to life before sunrise, emitting the products of combustion into the morning sky. Those emissions are then trapped in place by a colder layer of air until winds sweep them away.
“Inversions,” as they are called, were once thought to be only an ominous by-product of ever-expanding life in the Salt Lake valley. But as more and more folks choose Park City addresses, the insidious little impacts of everyday life are coming home to roost in this mountain community. The basin, located just north of Park City proper, is ideally situated to suffer from stagnant air, as it sits in a slight bowl, is surrounded by mountains, and is bordered by Highway 224 and Interstate 80 with their pollution-emitting traffic.
“I can remember driving into town every day to work. I lived in Wanship, and I could clearly see the inversion working in the Snyderville Basin,” recalls Frank Bell, Park City’s longtime police chief, who is currently town manager in Telluride, Colorado, another mountain resort community struggling to keep its squeaky-clean mountain air image.
Park City proper hasn’t yet been significantly afflicted with air pollution, though with its many fireplaces and close confines, the resort town needs to be proactive in its approach to air quality. Surprisingly, despite the inversions that plague Salt Lake City to the west and Heber City to the southeast, not until recently have Park City or Summit County officials been particularly concerned about the air they breathe.
“As far as I know, we’ve never had any testing here,” says Park City Mayor Dana Williams. “We’ve never had enough of a pollution issue that the Utah Department of Environmental Quality feels like we have to test here. So to a certain extent, it’s a little difficult to decide what to do.”
While there were efforts about a decade ago to have the Park City Council adopt wood-burning regulations, nothing was formally put on the books. Instead, the issue is currently addressed on a development-by-development basis, with no more than one wood-burning device allowed per unit. And while county officials have looked into various ways to lessen residents’ impact on the environment — such as working with Park City on converting municipal vehicles to bio-diesel fuels and looking into wind power —nothing has been done as yet to address fireplace emissions.
Bell knows well the travails of keeping the air clean. From Park City, he headed to Crested Butte, Colorado, as town manager before moving on to Telluride. Both communities have taken a get-tough approach to preserve their panoramic vistas. In Crested Butte, officials have so stringently restricted the use of wood-burning stoves and fireplaces that only about a half dozen remain in use, and they were grandfathered in. Over in Telluride, not only have officials banned wood-burning devices altogether, but they employ two street-sweepers on a daily basis year-round to reduce particulates from being kicked up into the air by traffic.
Of course, both of those towns lie in valleys much steeper and narrower than the one that cradles Park City, so they experience greater problems with inversions. Still, Park City officials recently decided to become more proactive in protecting their scenery and fresh air. Late last summer, our city council agreed to have an air-quality study performed so they at least have some baseline data they can turn to down the road. Mayor Williams also approached the Summit County Commission about doing a joint air-quality study so the Snyderville Basin’s winter woes can be documented.
Additionally, Park City will turn to “some of the standardized models of carbon foot-printing and determine what Park City’s footprint is, so that we have some quantitative information in terms of seeing what using bio-diesel fuel actually does for air-quality, how it affects that and how we can reduce the overall carbon in the city,” says the mayor.
Beyond that, the city is plumbing geo-thermal heat to warm its new police station building, currently under construction.
Bell believes Park City officials are being smart in addressing air quality issues before being told they have a crisis.
“I guess at the end of the day, you can either address your air pollution problem, or you can have the EPA (U.S. Environmental Protection Agency) or the state address it for you,” he says. “Typically, if you’re not willing to do something about it voluntarily, there is a federal agency out there willing to force you to comply.”
Though Kurt Repanshek and his family enjoy relaxing before a nice cracklin’ warm fire on a cold winter’s night, they’re looking for a good low-emission, high-BTU woodstove.
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