SALT LAKE CITY — As the fire in downtown Salt Lake City was put out Monday night, heavy smoke clouded the sky.
Tom Becnel, the director of engineering for TELLUS Network Sensor Solutions, said urban area fires have significant impacts on your health.
"Building fires are really bad because of all the stuff that they're burning, right? There's plastics and metal and insulation and other materials, and those emit, not just carbon like a wildfire smoke might, but also a bunch of bad pollutants like VOCs and more carbon monoxide than normal and other gases,” Becnel said.
Becnel said air quality improves as soon as the fire is put out, but remnants linger in the air.
TELLUS collects air quality data and puts their findings into animations to help community members see what the air looks like near their homes, Becnel said.
They sent an animation to FOX 13 News that resembled what the air quality might have been like near downtown Salt Lake during Monday night’s fire.
“PM 2.5 sensors is what we're looking at here,” Becnel said while showing the animation. “These are located all over the valley. I think there's four [hundred] or 500 that we pull from just in Salt Lake County alone.”
Becnel said the goal is to educate the community and start a discussion about more long-term solutions.
“Once communities have this data in their hands, they're more willing to discuss things like air quality,” Becnel said. "Then from there, we have more power and pressure to drive change with local legislators and things that we can do.”
