A red-hot economy, wildfire smoke from California and the shriveling of the Great Salt Lake are making Utah’s alarming pollution even worse.

Credit…Lindsay D’Addato for The New York Times

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By Simon Romero

SALT LAKE CITY — Kevin Perry had just begun his morning routine, stepping outside to get the newspaper, when he noticed something was wrong with the sky.

“Within 30 seconds, I was coughing and my throat hurt,” Dr. Perry, an atmospheric scientist at the University of Utah, said of that morning in August. “It was the absolute worst air quality I’ve ever experienced in my life.”

Shrouded in smoke drifting from California’s colossal wildfires 500 miles away, Salt Lake City had on that morning edged past smog-choked megacities like New Delhi and Jakarta to register the most polluted air of any major city in the world.

The grim distinction alarmed both longtime residents and newcomers to Utah, where a red-hot economy and easy access to outdoor pursuits like skiing and mountain biking are fueling the fastest-growing population of any state.

But the consequences of the growth, including more vehicles on the road, and this summer’s wildfire smoke are aggravating an already bleak deterioration in air quality brought on by a prolonged drought.

Scientists say the drought, plus water diversions, has shriveled the Great Salt Lake, the country’s largest body of water after the Great Lakes, to its lowest levels in more than a century. The result is vast areas of parched lake bed, similar to the dried-up Aral Sea in the former Soviet Union, exposing millions of people in Utah to dust storms laced with arsenic and other toxic elements.

“Every time the wind blows, we’re subject to the dust from these dry lake beds being scattered all over,” said Dr. Brian Moench, president of Utah Physicians for a Healthy Environment. “There are residuals of pesticides and agricultural chemicals that migrated into the lake over many decades.”

For the moment, the slow-motion ecological disaster of the shrinking Great Salt Lake appears to stand in contrast to the vibrancy of Salt Lake City, a nerve center for a $1.5 billion skiing industry that is also home to outdoor clothing companies like Black Diamond, Cotopaxi and Kuhl.

But while the outdoor recreation industry relies on blue-sky imagery, scientists say that air quality around the Wasatch Front, the metropolitan region where about 80 percent of people in Utah live, is getting more worse than many residents realize.

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