Oliver Loubet’s daily routines include wearing one of the many graphic T-shirts hanging in his closet — all in different colors, but each with the same design: a cartoon version of a tuxedo, with the lapels of the jacket, a shirt and a bow tie.
Another of 13-year-old Oliver’s daily routines is to carry two inhalers.
Members of the Loubet family are among dozens of west-siders The Salt Lake Tribune and KUER have interviewed during the past year to hear — in their own voices — what it’s like to live where air pollution can reach dangerous, even deadly, levels.
The health effects of living in bad air, experts say, are comparable to what smoking does to the body. And the economic effects, as health problems lead to higher medical bills and lost time at work and school, can also take a toll.
- [”Reaching for Air”: Hear the voices of west-side residents on our interactive presentation. Plus, check out the west side’s air quality in real-time on our map.]
The Loubets live in Kearns — a sound pick for a family with six kids. It’s an affordable, eclectic township with friendly neighbors, block parties and convenient parks.
Their house was also near a gravel pit, a construction manufacturing facility and a snack food distribution center — all polluting industries. The home is not too far from the ailing Great Salt Lake as well, and the parched lakebed exacerbates the dust storms that sometimes smother the area. In addition, research shows the exposed crust of the lakebed is known to hold toxins, like arsenic and thallium, a tasteless and odorless metal that can act as a poison.
It was when the Loubet family moved to Kearns from Provo six years ago that Oliver started struggling to breathe. His dad — state Rep. Anthony Loubet — and mom, Kira, witnessed how he went from constantly clearing his throat to gasping for air in between words when he spoke.
“It took longer to say things,” Oliver said.
“It got to a point where he could only say one word, clear throat, one word, clear throat,” Kira said. “[We thought] this is not OK. We've got to figure out what's causing this problem.”
During a doctor visit, the family found out that Oliver had severe allergies to things such as pollen, trees and weeds. Even after medications, allergy shots, deep cleanings, air purifiers and a hypoallergenic mattress, whenever air pollution levels rose, the sound of Oliver clearing his throat returned.
During “yellow” air quality day — the color code used to describe a moderate level of pollution concern — Oliver had to sit in the back of the classroom, trying to get his lungs to catch up and start breathing normally. He later learned he was having his first asthma attack at six years old.
After that, school officials started keeping track of bad air days, he said, and prevented him from going outside when they deemed it unhealthy. He and two other kids, who also suffered from asthma, spent their recesses in a school office.
“Our teacher in first grade, she would give us these tablets to play around with, because she felt bad we couldn't go outside,” he said. “And so we just sat there together, and we got to play with each other. So, luckily, I wasn't the only one getting left out.”
On average, missing recess happened once or twice a week. In tougher months, such as September and November, Kira said, there were entire weeks when Oliver wasn’t allowed out.
The problems get worse every time he tries to exercise, especially outside, he said. Usually, within 30 minutes of rigorous physical activity, Oliver begins to wheeze, and his focus quickly shifts from the activity to breathing. It’s hard for his parents to witness; they remember how much he liked playing soccer or basketball, and how progressively harder it has become for him to remain active.
“I hate [him] having that limitation,” his mom said, “to not be able to go out and play.”
Oliver tried out for the soccer team, but his lungs couldn’t keep up after the practice rounds, he said. Recently, he has found an equalizer: pickleball — a sport he can play for more than half an hour, and be truly competitive. He also finds solace in video games, a hobby he shares with his siblings.
“There are times that I just really wish that I could do something, but I can't because of the air,” Oliver said. “And so I don't necessarily get mad at it. But I'm just sad that I can't go and do something while I see my friends doing it.”
How pollution hits the body
When surgeons see the exposed lungs of longtime Wasatch Front residents, they encounter signs of the unhealthy air — even among nonsmokers.
“They don't look young, healthy and pink, like they should,” Dr. Brian Moench, president of Utah Physicians for a Healthy Environment, said. “When we see autopsy studies that show air pollution particles contaminating the placenta, the lungs, the brain, the liver, we know that some of those particles never leave the body.”
Moench noted that the west side is exposed to more kinds of pollution than the east side.
West-siders live immediately downwind of some of the Salt Lake Valley’s major oil refineries, adjacent to the tailings ponds of the Kennecott mine, as close as anybody else to the Great Salt Lake and its increasing number of dust storms — mixed with such heavy metals as arsenic, mercury, lead and cadmium. There are also major freeways that converge in the areas and other industries that can produce carcinogenic chemicals.
Think of every health outcome related to smoking cigarettes, and chances are they are related to air pollution exposure, Moench said. Pollution triggers an inflammatory response that affects the entire body, not only the lungs.
A nonsmoker, he said, probably loses anywhere from two to three years of their life expectancy from chronic exposure to the air pollution levels experienced along the Wasatch Front.
“It's also the heart, the blood vessels,” Moench said. “It's even things like the endocrine system, it’s the neurologic system, it's the brain nerves.”
Air pollution also could produce implications in pregnancy, It can present an inflammatory trigger for various vascular problems of the placenta.
“It can induce virtually every kind of poor pregnancy outcome you can think of, including stillbirths and birth defects, [and] things like premature births.” Moench said. “And when a mother is exposed to air pollution, and the development of the fetus is impaired like that, the health consequences to her baby can be lifelong.”
No level of air pollution is safe, Moench said. Every bit of exposure, even when the background levels are low, will have a significant public health impact.
With other projects potentially making their way to the west side — including the inland port and Interstate 15 expansion, both amid public uproar — a reduction of the air quality problem doesn’t seem likely.
“Inland ports in other areas have been nicknamed ‘diesel death zones’ for a good reason. They are the logistics centers of thousands and thousands of truck trips every day,” Moench said. “Diesel emissions are some of the most toxic sources of air pollution in a typical urban area. They're more toxic than the emissions from an average vehicle.”
The cost of sick absences
Daniel Mendoza, a University of Utah professor of atmospheric sciences, internal medicine (pulmonary division) and city planning, explored the impact of air pollution on absenteeism. For him, the subject was personal.
“I've had asthma since I was a little kid. It did impair my ability to go to school,” he said. “I see this happening much more in socioeconomically disadvantaged communities.”
Mendoza is chair of the Utah Department of Health and Human Services’ Asthma Task Force, which, among other endeavors, conducts school recess guidance. On “orange” days, the task force advises kids who are asthmatic or susceptible to air pollution to stay indoors. On “red” days, all kids are advised to stay inside.
But it’s not only about checking the daily levels of pollution. Schools also need to be prepared with lesson plans, or substitute teachers.
“Recess is not just for kids,” Mendoza said. “It's also for teachers to relax, unwind, have a sandwich, get a break, go to the bathroom.”
Mendoza’s team compared several years of absenteeism data to information captured by research and regulatory-grade stationary sensors, and sensors mounted on top of TRAX trains across Salt Lake City in 2017 and 2018.
Several factors, Mendoza said, could contribute to the absentee rates: housing stability, access to health care, food accessibility — an important element, as the west side contains more “food deserts,” where grocery stores are fewer and farther between, than the east side. The economy could also be a factor, since some kids have to get a job to help support their families.
Schools on the west side of the city had a 20% to 30% higher rate of absences, compared to the rates of people living east of the school. In addition to that baseline, Mendoza said, west-side kids experienced worse air pollution. So, in those inversion or high ozone days, the levels of absenteeism among west-siders were two to three times higher.
Some students often missed half days when the air quality was bad, as they returned to class from recess with a cough that wouldn’t stop. That made the Asthma Task Force push for emergency inhalers to be part of the schools' medicine cabinet.
“Now every school in Utah has emergency inhalers,” Mendoza said, “and they've been used.”
If health concerns don’t make the case against air pollution, he said, maybe economics will.
“While about 50% of people believe in climate change in the U.S., 100% believe in lung cancer,” Mendoza said, “and 150% of people believe in the dollar.”
For every day a child misses school, as much as $250 is lost, the professor said, citing 2018 statistics.
That figure includes $40 a school spends, on average, for each student per day. It also includes the $10 that would have been spent on making that student’s school lunch — bearing in mind that between 60% and 70% of students rely on free or reduced-price lunch. And a parent who has to take the day off of work could lose upward of $200 in lost wages (for someone with a $25 hourly wage).
Then there’s the economic multiplier effect, which analyzes indirect effects of monetary loss. In a conservative estimate, for every $1 a person earns, there is $2.50 circulating through the economy.
The combination of those factors led the researchers to determine that the minimum cost of bad air quality in Utah schools is close to $1 million a year. Cutting air pollution in half, according to Mendoza, would save about $426,000 a year.
How west-side kids see it
There have been many demonstrations around the shrinking Great Salt Lake and other environmental threats in the state.
Activists have shown up at the Utah Legislature to speak against polluting projects. Others have written the lake’s obituary. Children in West Valley City schools reflected on air quality through art and won awards in a statewide competition.
In September 2022, some kids organized a “die-in” in the receding lakebed.
They wrote the causes of their fictional deaths on cardboard tombstones and laid down in a protest that called on Utah’s elected officials to protect the lake and to preserve it by investing in such practical solutions as reducing water usage.
Read some of the grave markers: “I died from arsenic poisoning.” “Died from toxic dust bowl.” “Legislators let me die.” “RIP, killed by bad air quality.”
Natalie Roberts, a 16-year-old West High student and an organizer at Utah Youth Environmental Solutions, said that these such demonstrations can be a call to action for an “environmental disaster.”
“If we bring more of an emotional value, and show all the ways that people could tragically be dying in the future, and are suffering right now, then we can hope to illuminate what's going on here, because it's very clear,” she said. “But still some people don't see it.”
Roberts wants to see solutions, she said at the event, including not diverting the Bear River for farming and development projects, and seeing that water flow instead into the Great Salt Lake.
“My sign says, ‘Utah's legislators failed us,’ and they have, because they are not out here with us today,” she said. “They continue to ignore the problem that is so visible: The Great Salt Lake is drying up. And they continue to ignore that problem and come up with solutions that are just ridiculous, like building a pipeline from the Pacific Ocean.”
When asked about possible solutions to the air quality, Kira Loubet, Oliver’s mom, said west-siders “just deal with it because we've always had these problems.”
“We never really think there could be a solution,” she said. “because there never has been.”
Both looked to state Republican Rep. Anthony Loubet for answers. The one-term legislator (Loubet beat Democratic incumbent Claire Collard in the 2022 election) sponsored a resolution during the 2023 legislative session “encouraging Utahns, businesses and other entities to take steps to reduce idling.” While it was a small step, Loubet said, “every little bit helps.”
The lawmaker is open to taking stronger legislative action to clean the air, but he doesn’t know exactly what that looks like.
“One of the big things right now is just to gather the data, to figure out what [are] the causes,” he said, “so we can come up with some solutions.”
Oliver Loubet said he doesn’t know what his life would look like without severe allergies or breathing problems because he’s “just gotten used to it.”
But, he said, he sure would like to live in that world someday.
- [”Reaching for Air”: Hear the voices of west-side residents on our interactive presentation. Plus, check out the west side’s air quality in real-time on our map.]
Editor’s note: This story is part of Reaching for Air — a collaboration of The Salt Lake Tribune, KUER and the Brown Institute for Media Innovation, which explores air quality along the Salt Lake Valley’s west side. If you would like to share your story, please complete this survey or leave a voice message at 385-419-2470.
