SALT LAKE CITY — A major inversion is coming back to northern Utah, and the bad air is expected to linger for days from Cache Valley to Utah County.
Erin Mendenhall works with Breathe Utah, which is a non-profit organization that seeks to educate people on ways stay healthy, especially during an inversion. She said people shouldn’t get used to the inversion and instead should work toward making changes.
“We should get more and more involved in protecting our health and making less of a pollution impact as the inversion goes on,” Mendenhall said.
Nanette Hosenfeld, National Weather Service meteorologist, said the inversion is likely to hang around through next week.
“We’ll get a winter storm that comes through and puts snow down on the valley floor,” she said. “And then we have high pressure that goes in and acts like that lid, trapping the cold air from the storm, and it really just takes another storm to come in and clear us out.”
There is currently a health advisory for sensitive people like children, the elderly and those with respiratory problems.
Mendenhall said one way people can help is to consolidate their driving to reduce pollution; One example would be combining errands with the drive home rather than making separate trips.
The Department of Environmental Quality has a restriction on wood burning and wood stoves for the next few days. The DEQ requires those who use their wood stoves as their only source of heat to register with them first.
