Brian Moench: How Utahns can avoid being downwinder victims of Great Salt Lake

In 2007, a dense winter inversion became a watershed moment in exposing Wasatch Front air pollution as a pernicious plague. For thousands, day after day over six weeks, breathing was a struggle. As with all air pollution events, in retrospect we know people died from it.

It was a wake-up call for the medical community, media, the public, and politicians. Utah Physicians for a Healthy Environment (UPHE) was formed shortly after. Gov. Jon Huntsman made air pollution a top three issue of his administration after he met with us that spring. Mayor Rocky Anderson stated he dared not invite out of state business leaders to SLC during inversion season. Online groups formed, of people leaving the state or planning to do so, with pollution being the deal breaker.

In 2025 we are at another watershed moment. Utah air pollution has changed with the climate. Winter inversions are less severe, but wildfire smoke and ozone are increasing. A new source of air pollution looms as the new potential deal breaker—a toxic dust bowl replacing the Great Salt Lake.

By allowing massive diversions of the lake’s inlets, Utah is following an all-too-familiar pattern of government waiting too long to protect citizens from environmental hazards, industrial toxins and dangerous consumer products despite more than enough evidence to demand intervention. Millions of people have been victimized by leaded paint and gasoline, asbestos, pesticides like DDT, cigarettes, oxycontin, PFAS, BPA, and nuclear radiation because of government’s to failure act. No one knows this painful story better than Utahns, tens of thousands of whom became downwinder victims of nuclear radiation they were told was safe.

Hoping to break that tragic cycle, UPHE physicians, who specialize in the health consequences of air pollution and environmental toxins, reviewed all the relevant medical research, including over 500 studies, and compiled the most comprehensive document on the public health hazards of allowing the Great Salt Lake to disappear. Our report, Downwind, should be another wake up call.

Our health is already being impacted by GSL dust, not just from obvious dust storms. The smallest and therefore most dangerous particles become atmospheric during much more frequent, minimal winds. These particles are not reliably detected by dust monitors. They stay in the atmosphere for weeks or longer, perpetuating human exposure. For multiple reasons, the health hazard exceeds that indicated by standard air quality monitors.

Natural lakebed dust is toxic by itself, because once inhaled it is treated by the body as a foreign invasion, triggering an inflammatory chemical cascade. But that response is magnified by tag along toxins of many different types from multiple sources.

Kennecott’s mining operation has contaminated the Great Salt Lake ecosystem —surface and ground water, air, and soil — with carcinogenic and neurotoxic heavy metals for more than 120 years. Herbicides and insecticides have been sprayed relentlessly around the lake’s shores for decades. Mag Corp has poured deadly dioxins, furans, and PCBs into the same general area for 50 years. At least 28 sewage treatment plants, which were never designed to sequester toxic chemicals, discharge “forever chemicals,” PAHs, plastic nanoparticles, and pharmaceutical metabolites into the lake and its tributaries. Radionuclides from decades of Nevada nuclear tests still contaminate the Great Basin and the lake bed. Urban air pollution combines with the dust in complex atmospheric reactions to create new toxic particles and gases. An expanding dry lake is a growing catalyst for more ozone.

Exposure to multiple different toxins, each at supposedly “safe” concentrations, is not safe. The cumulative toxicity is at least additive, and can be even synergistic.

Elsewhere in the world where lakes have been siphoned dry, public health consequences have been profound, with dramatic increases in numerous diseases and decreases in life expectancy. Fetuses, infants, and young children are the most victimized because the harm can be life-long and irreversible, though it may not manifest until decades later. Harm from these environmental toxins has been documented even in subsequent, unexposed generations, indicating genetic and epigenetic damage.

Utah’s lawmakers are poised to drain even more water from the lake via the Bear River Project, inland ports, wetlands destruction, data centers, and nuclear power plants—all of which is the exact opposite of preserving the lake. The “precautionary principle” in medicine calls for preventive intervention to avoid health hazards, if potential harm is plausible and consistent with established research, even if that evidence is incomplete. The precautionary principle must be applied now to saving Great Salt Lake.

If you live in Northern Utah, and intend to do so 10 years from now, I suggest you send the link to our report, which you can find at uphe.org, to the governor and your legislator.

Tell them their undying dreams of economic nirvana in Utah will become nightmares if its population has had to pack up and leave simply because the air was no longer safe to breathe.

Brian Moench, M.D., is the president of Utah Physicians for a Healthy Environment.

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