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State leaders knew building a massive prison complex near the Great Salt Lake wouldn't be easy. There are wetlands and migratory birds to worry about. The soft soil makes construction difficult. The swarms of mosquitoes create a never-ending irritant.

But potentially poisonous dust storms caused by the shrinking lake? That's a new one.

The state has fast-tracked a study to determine what inmates and corrections officers might inhale when a stiff wind inevitably kicks up dust from the dry lakebed. It could be just salts and other benign particles, but it may contain toxic levels of heavy metals such as arsenic, selenium and mercury. A person breathing enough of that material is likely to develop serious respiratory problems. It could also result in birth defects and lung cancer.

"We need to know what people are going to be exposed to out there," said Kevin Perry, chairman of atmospheric sciences at the University of Utah, and the study's leader. "It turns out the prison site is actually a black hole for meteorological data and a black hole for air-quality data."

He's starting from scratch and hoping to get underway in June. If things go well, he'll have an answer in four months, but it could take as long as a year, a process that is likely to delay the purchase of a prison site and construction.

The state decided last fall to build a new prison on land west of Salt Lake City International Airport, but hasn't yet settled on the specific property. At a projected cost of roughly $550 million, the state hoped to open the new 4,000-bed complex in 2020.

"We feel the pressure. We feel the need to constantly move forward, but we will get the information we need," said Marilee Richins, operations officer for the Utah Department of Administrative Services. "So much depends on the results of the tests."

And it's not just the dust test, the state is also still studying the corrosive nature of salt blown on power and data lines and figuring out how to manage mosquitoes and other insects that bite, without decimating a vital food source for migratory birds.

Environmentalists give the state credit for taking these concerns seriously before buying land and breaking ground.

"I have to commend [the state] for having the wherewithal to be thorough and, by Jove, if it extends the deadline on when the facility is open for business, so be it," said Lynn de Freitas, executive director of Friends of Great Salt Lake.

At this point, Richins said, she couldn't provide an estimated timeline. When those reviews are complete, her office will hand over detailed reports on the three sites under consideration to Gov. Gary Herbert, who wants to make the final call. Two of the plots, known as the west and central sites, are close to the lake and would take the brunt of the dust storms, but that is also the land favored by state lawmakers and Salt Lake City leaders because it would bring utilities and roads farther into this area of the city, allowing for future construction of a new industrial park.

The third plot, called the east site, is adjacent to an old landfill, and that brings its own concerns. The state is hesitant to launch "invasive testing," which includes drilling for soil samples, because it doesn't know what is in the landfill. If a test causes an environmental problem with the movement of toxic materials, the state would then be liable to clean it up, under its agreement with Rio Tinto, which owns that land.

"The due diligence portion of this has taken longer than expected," Richins said, "and, honestly, that's because the site is challenging."

Perry's dust study wasn't even a consideration a few months ago. Originally offered as a one-year study of the entire Great Salt Lake area, Perry shifted its initial focus to the prison site when construction managers learned of the concern and offered to boost his funding.

He'll focus first on the dry bed around Farmington Bay and Saltair, collecting soil samples and placing air-monitoring equipment. He'll determine how fast the wind would need to be moving to kick up dust into the atmosphere, then he'll figure out what particles are most likely to be breathed in. Dust storms are already common around the lake, which hit its lowest water level ever recorded in late 2015, and those storms could get much worse.

Perry equated it to Owens Lake in California, where water diverted to Los Angeles in the late 1910s and early 1920s left a dry lake bed that remains the single largest source of air pollution in the nation nearly 100 years later.

For years, Los Angeles has pumped water onto that lake bed to try to keep the dust down.

The Great Salt Lake isn't going to disappear soon, but the prison is expected to be operational for at least 50 years, requiring long-term planning. Beyond the naturally occurring minerals in a salty lake, the Great Salt Lake has been used as a place industrial plants and mines have dumped waste for a century, which Perry said could add to the contaminants he may find in the months to come.

mcanham@sltrib.com Twitter: @mattcanham