Cache Valley residents offered opportunity to become involved with the local air quality issue

By Ashley Springer

 

The second annual Cache Clean Air Consortium will dive deeper into what the community can do to clean up the air. The consortium will be held at the Riverwoods Conference Center on Sept. 21 from 9 a.m. to 3 p.m.

“This year we decided because we got a lot of the preliminary information out of the way to focus on kind of bigger scale things that organizations and institutions could do,” said Jennifer Pemberton, a member of the consortium's planning committee. "This is Air Quality 2.0, last year was very 1.0.”

Randy Martin, one of the local speakers at the consortium and an associate professor at Utah State University, got involved with the consortium because he has studied the air in Cache Valley for the past 15 years and because he lives and is raising a family here.

“The local air pollution is an important thing to understand and be involved with,” Martin said. "Awareness is the first step."

“It’s not just for experts, it’s not just for activists, it’s for anybody who lives and breathes in this community,” Pemberton said.

Cache Valley is an enclosed environment. “With the cold air in the winter putting an inversion cap on our valley, it’s basically like the cold air puts a lid on... and doesn’t allow any exchange for days, sometimes weeks on end,” said Jeff Gilbert, a transportation planner for the Cache Metropolitan Planning Organization. This causes the emissions released into the air from various sources to circulate from day-to-day without the exchange with the clean air outside of the cap until there is a storm to clear it out.

According to Gilbert, residents should be aware of what is going on with the air quality because it is a serious health issue when concentrations get high.

“When the conditions are right, we can have some of the worst air in the nation, there is absolutely no doubt about that,” Martin said.

Organizers of the consortium are hoping to have residents come ready to get involved and make contacts.

“One of the most unique things about our group and what the consortium offers and what the workshops offers is the opportunity to just meet people who have the same concerns but maybe have different skill sets,” Pemberton said. “We definitely want people to come prepared to form a team and to find people who have the resources they need to help them accomplish what they want to accomplish in the next year."

The consortium will have two keynote speakers: Ted Wilson, the executive director of UCAIR — a partnership in Utah focused on helping communities and individuals make small changes to improve the air quality — and Shane Marshall, the deputy director of UDOT — the Utah Department of Transportation. The consortium will also feature four local Cache Valley speakers: Martin; Logan Mayor Craig Petersen; Melissa Gibbs, the airshed coordinator for the Idaho Department of Environmental Quality; and Cindy Roberts, of the Cache Business Resource Center. Following the provided lunch, there are four workshops participants can choose to attend.

More information about consortium registration is available at: http://www.cachecleanairconsortium.org/#!ccac-registration/c1diz