The winter the air cleared

Complaints about the smoke from Geneva are almost as old as the mill. In the 1950s about 300 livestock owners in Utah and Salt Lake counties sued U.S. Steel, claiming that fluorine gases and fine particles from the furnaces at Geneva had harmed their animals, and the cases reached the federal appeals court in Denver in 1958. But the fight that made the mill famous in medical journals came three decades later, and it began with an accident of labor history.

On August 1, 1986, a national strike against USX, as U.S. Steel was then called, shut the Geneva Works except for caretaker crews. Steelmaking stayed shut down through the winter of 1986 to 1987 and did not reopen until September 1987, under the local owners who bought it. For the first time since the war, Utah Valley spent a winter without its largest source of smoke.

A valley under a lid

That mattered because of the valley's geography. In winter, cold air settles on the floor of Utah Valley under a lid of warmer air, and whatever the valley emits stays put for days. The Environmental Protection Agency set national standards for PM10, the fine particles small enough to reach deep into the lungs, in 1987, and Utah could not meet the 24 hour limit in either Salt Lake or Utah County.

The mill's own control plan later described the problem: exceedances happened only during winter inversions, from 2 to 22 times a season in recent years. An EPA review of that plan noted that Geneva produced 85 percent of the sulfur dioxide emitted in the valley's air basin, much of which turned into fine particles in the stagnant air.

An economist counts admissions

C. Arden Pope III was not a physician. He was an economist in BYU's agricultural economics department who had studied the dollar value of clean air. In 1988 a student asked him for a term paper topic, and he pointed her to a news story about Geneva reopening after the long shutdown. She gathered three years of hospital records for children admitted with respiratory problems, then dropped the class. Pope typed the data in himself.

What he found was published in the American Journal of Public Health in May 1989. Pope compared admissions for pneumonia, pleurisy, bronchitis and asthma at Utah Valley hospitals from April 1985 through February 1988 with PM10 readings. In winter months when the mill was open, PM10 levels were nearly double those of the winter it was closed, even though that closed winter had relatively stagnant air. Children's admissions were two to three times higher in the winters the mill ran. In months when 24 hour PM10 topped the federal limit of 150 micrograms per cubic meter, children's admissions nearly tripled. Utah hospitals outside the valley showed no such pattern.

Douglas Dockery of the Harvard School of Public Health called it "a landmark study." Epidemiologists rarely get to switch a pollution source off and watch what happens. In Utah Valley a labor dispute had done it for them.

Pushback

Utah Valley did not universally welcome the news. Letter writers defended the mill, and Pope was dismissed as a long haired environmentalist and a Harvard liberal. Geneva officials stressed that the valley met federal air standards 355 days a year and that the study did not tie the particles directly to the plant. In September 1989 the company presented Dr. Steven Lamm, an epidemiologist it had hired, who blamed the winter admissions on respiratory syncytial virus, which peaks in January and February. Pope called the review "crude and very hastily put together." He and Sam Rushforth of Utah Valley Citizens for Clean Air said Geneva had timed its release to sway a hearing the next week on the state's PM10 plan.

Feelings were already raw. In April 1988 a broken steam line at the open hearth furnaces forced Geneva to bypass its pollution controls for two and a half hours, and a bright orange cloud of iron oxide dust drifted over northern Utah County. It came the day after a hearing in Orem where 400 citizens turned out and many blamed the mill for their health problems. By 1991 a BYU honors student surveying local businesses found that 55 percent called air pollution a discouraging factor for locating in Utah County.

Pope kept publishing. A 1991 paper found that bronchitis and asthma admissions for preschool children in Utah Valley were about twice as frequent when the steel mill operated, while no such difference appeared in Salt Lake or Cache valleys. In 1992 Pope, Joel Schwartz and Michael Ransom reported that a rise of 100 micrograms in five day average PM10 in Utah County was associated with about 16 percent more deaths per day. Ransom and Pope linked particles to elementary school absences in Provo and Alpine schools. With Dockery's loaned equipment, Pope measured lung function in fifth and sixth graders through the winter of 1990 to 1991.

Clearer skies and a lasting experiment

The mill changed too. Geneva's 1990 plan to meet the state's PM10 rules centered on a Q-BOP oxygen steelmaking shop to replace the open hearths, estimated at $62 million, plus a sulfur removal plant for coke oven gas meant to cut those sulfur emissions about 95 percent, and a biological wastewater plant. Utah submitted its PM10 plan for Salt Lake and Utah counties in November 1991, and the EPA approved it on July 8, 1994.

By January 1995 the Deseret News reported that Geneva's modernization had cost $120 million, including an $80 million Q-BOP that started in 1991. Total emissions at the mill had fallen from 15,118 tons in 1988 to 4,082. Geneva's share of the county's fine particles, put at 55 percent in the late 1980s plan, was now under 25 percent, and the Lindon monitor had gone 23 months without a PM10 violation, the longest stretch ever recorded. "Something significant has happened," said Bob Dalley of the state Division of Air Quality. Utah County has met the PM10 standard since 1996.

The closure kept teaching long after the mill reopened. In 2001 EPA scientists put extracts of air filters collected near the mill before, during and after the shutdown into the lungs of volunteers and of laboratory rats. Particles from the years the mill ran caused more inflammation than an equal mass from the closed winter, and they carried more metals such as copper, zinc, iron, lead, nickel and arsenic. In 2008 CDC researchers reported that mothers pregnant around the time of the closure were less likely to deliver prematurely.

Pope went on to work with Dockery on the Harvard Six Cities study and the American Cancer Society study, which tied long term exposure to fine particles to higher death rates across the country. Those studies helped drive the EPA's 1997 fine particle standards, which industry challenged and the Supreme Court upheld in 2001. Their roots lead back to one quiet winter on the east shore of Utah Lake.