SALT LAKE CITY — Air pollution data from across the state suggests that Utahns did cut fireworks use this year.
While air quality monitors did notice a surge coinciding with times when people would be setting off personal fireworks and cities would be doing professional shows, it did not surge like previous years.
"Firework impacts to air quality on the 4th of July weekend appear to be pretty low," the Utah Department of Environmental Quality said in a statement to FOX 13 News. "Across the network we did see some hourly spikes in the evenings at some of our monitoring stations. Those numbers can be seen on our trend charts. While some of these spikes were relatively high, the 24 hour average that the standard is based on did not move too much and we did not see any exceedances across the network."
The agency attributed the decline to a couple of things: fewer fireworks were used and winds also blew firework smoke (maybe enough to avoid significantly tripping up monitors).
Because of the ongoing drought emergency in Utah, state officials and firefighters have been pleading with people to avoid using personal fireworks. Communities across Utah have documented brush fires that they have said are human-caused.
