The hazy, smokelike air lingering over the Wasatch Front on Monday was dirty enough for state health officials to advise children and the elderly to stay inside.
It was once much worse.
In fact, the air in downtown Salt Lake City was so smoggy in the 1920s that some residents escaped to Los Angeles each winter to avoid the blackened, smoky skies.
Thanks to coal burning as the predominant heating source — coupled with periodic inversions — Salt Lake had a significant pollution problem in the late 19th and the early 20th centuries.
The air quality was so awful by the 1920s that Salt Lake City created the "Smog Abatement Department."
But by that time, folks in the valley had been worrying about air pollution for decades. One of the first references was a Nov. 15, 1881, letter by a reader to the Deseret News, complaining about the "smoke nuisance."
Smoggy skies are also evident in an 1892 Shipler photograph of a new electric light atop the Salt Lake Temple, showing the very hazy skies in the downtown background.
"Winter days when the air was so heavy with smoke that a white shirt wouldn't stay white long enough to dry on the backyard clothesline," David Hampshire states in his history book of Mountain Fuel/Questar, "No Western Parallel."
The murky air not only created respiratory problems, it left sooty deposits — outside and inside — on automobiles, furniture and just about everything else.
It made "spring cleaning" really mean something in its day.
"When I was a boy living in Salt Lake City, most homes were heated with coal stoves. Black smoke belched forth from almost every chimney," late LDS Church President Gordon B. Hinckley stated in a General conference address in April 1996. "As winter came to a close, black soot and grime were everywhere, both inside and outside of the house."
Smokeless fuels for heating were always viewed as the solution to this problem, but getting natural gas in ample and affordable supply wasn't easy.
In 1929, Salt Lake and some surrounding communities benefited from the first-ever supply of natural gas (and some 10,000 new customers) from a newly completed, 116-mile pipeline from Kanda, Wyo.
An October 1930 newspaper ad on the first effect of that service stated: "Let the sun shine — The first winter of natural gas service brings remarkable reduction in smoke."
That joy was short-lived, however. The new pipeline suffered thousands of breaks from the cold during its first two winters.
With the dawn of the Great Depression, the price of natural gas shot up to 30 percent to 50 percent more than the price of coal, making it a luxury commodity that only the rich could afford.
That changed during World II, when oil and coal prices skyrocketed. By the end of the war, natural gas had become much cheaper, and its uses had expanded to cooking and water heating. It was so coveted that government restricted new applicants for service to only those two uses, and not heating buildings.
By the 1950s, Mountain Fuel (now Questar) began delivering natural gas service to large numbers of people along the Wasatch Front. The first mass application day, March 18, 1950, drew an estimated 5,000 people waiting to apply for hookups in Salt Lake, and the line snaked around more than three city blocks.
"Veteran police officers called it by far the biggest human lineup this city has ever seen," the Deseret News reported that day.
Other cities followed with natural gas service, though some, like Hooper in Weber County, didn't receive it until 1965. Southern Utah wasn't on line until the late 1980s.
Today, more than 90 percent of Utah homes are heated with natural gas. Even so, skies become hazy, particularly in winter during an inversion like the one that settled over the Wasatch Front on Monday.
e-mail: lynn@desnews.com