As Dr. Brian Moench highlights in his recent Salt Lake Tribune commentary, the inland port, as planned, could grace our already crowded highways with 70,000 daily semitruck trips and twice that many automobile trips.
One need not have an advanced degree in environmental science to recognize that the sort of atmospheric load such additions impose will make today’s mostly opaque gray skies look comparatively clear in retrospect.
On Dec. 2, the Utah Inland Port Authority Board held another of its “input theater” events. You know, a session wherein board members enthuse about the economic benefits to be realized, tossing purr words like “green” and “eco-friendly” into the mix.
Such terms have no business being used in connection with any inland port — there is no such thing as a “green” or “eco-friendly” inland port. Rather, inland ports are massive generators of pollutants, pollutants that will blight the Salt Lake Valley’s mostly cuneate topology with particulate likely to resemble the air of a pool room filled with cigar smokers.
After the board’s happy talk, citizens are given time to comment. This, it turns out, becomes a good time for board members to check email, text messages and their watches as they listen in silence to the 100% of voices raised in opposition, voices of health and environmental experts, together with informed valley citizens, expressing their horror at the prospect of such a lethally poisonous undertaking; an undertaking moving ahead as if concerns about massively degrading the valley’s air and physical environment needn’t trouble serious people’s thinking.
Add the inland port authority to the list of examples (e.g., Medicare expansion, redistricting, medical marijuana) showing how little citizens’ concerns equate to legislators’ concerns.
As my wife and I near retirement, we are looking to downsize. We are both Salt Lake City natives and heartsick at the certainty of what devastating effects on valley residents’ health and physical environment the port will impose.
This is not speculation. Tens of thousands of incremental motor vehicle trips, as well as additional air and rail traffic, cannot help but exacerbate the valley’s already dangerously polluted airshed.
We love this city. We love our incomparable mountains and the amazing access we have to scenic wonders many people never get to experience at all. But our search for more suitably sized housing excludes our home city. Like the ill-fated (for Salt Lake City) Outdoor Retailer Show, we will be looking for someplace more dedicated to people’s health and environmental protections.
After this bell has been rung, valley residents will find themselves mired in atmospheric filth so dense that younger residents will find it hard to believe that the Wasatch and Oquirrh mountains were once visible from anywhere in the valley.
Once rung, it will prove to be a bell impossible to unring.
Thomas Walker
Thomas (Tom) Walker is a Salt Lake City native. After many years working in the hospitality industry, he went to work teaching skiing with Vail Resorts in Park City. An avid lifelong (so far) skier, he also is a board member of the Alta Historical Society.