When the school year ends, the family of six is leaving for Kansas City.

It’s a move they never wanted to make, but Adrienne and Jared Cardon are worried. Three of their four children have severe asthma. They need supplemental oxygen when they get sick in the winter and don’t dare go outside when there’s wildfire smoke.

Now the family is focused on a newer hazard: dust from the drying Great Salt Lake, containing heavy metals including arsenic, lead and lithium. They’re concerned about what the wind may bring to their neighborhood an hour’s drive from the southern shore, and how dust storms could complicate the children’s respiratory problems.

“It’s our kids’ health. I just don’t want to roll the dice,” Adrienne Cardon said.

With climate change at the forefront of their decision-making, the Cardons are among other Utahns considering the health of the lake as they plan for the future.

In a statewide survey of 800 Utahns in 2024, researchers at Utah State University found nearly a quarter considered risks tied to lake in the course of family planning. And 35% indicated they have thought to some extent about moving because of desiccation of the lake. Qualitative research is also shedding light.

“People are really concerned about health risks, particularly for children, people who are pregnant and impacts on fetal development in the womb,” said Stacia Ryder, an assistant professor of sociology at the university.

In a series of small focus groups Ryder and colleagues conducted in 2024 and 2025, participants drew an image of themselves and illustrated where on their bodies they saw being affected by the lake, with one drawing a red “X” over the body’s uterus and a broken heart in the chest.

“When she was explaining it, she said, ‘I know how the poor air quality can have really long- term, devastating effects. Even if I’m healthy in any and every other way,'” Ryder recalled.

Ryder said she wonders if her own daughter, now just a year old, will develop asthma or another respiratory issue growing up in Ogden.

“I thought about that a lot when I was pregnant, and I still do,” Ryder said.

The lake has a key role in sustaining communities along northern Utah’s Wasatch Front, powering the state economy and keeping the natural environment in balance. Decades of drought, higher temperatures, climate change and diversion of water for farming, cities and industry have combined to dry it up.

Its south arm dropped to a record low in 2022 and recovered after historic snowfall, but has dipped back down to a hazardous level, with Utah snowpack at an all-time low. State leaders and even President Donald Trump are pledging to make it the first terminal saline lake ever to be fully restored.

Joel Ferry, executive director of the Utah Department of Natural Resources, warned four years ago that without dramatic action, Utah had a “potential environmental nuclear bomb” on its hands.

The state rushed to pour $40 million into a conservation trust in 2023, and outside groups pledged $200 million. Utah set up new programs to reimburse farmers for irrigation upgrades and measure households’ outdoor water use. It also revamped “use it or lose it” policies that dinged farmers for water shares they sent downstream, codifying that type of conservation as a “beneficial use.”

Ferry said the triage phase is over and targeted treatment has begun, with an easier system for farmers to get paid to leave fields dry.

“We took significant steps, and you can see that we’re not done,” Ferry told Utah News Dispatch. “The outcome will be, we’re going to cover those dust spots.”

Ferry acknowledges Utahns like the Cardons are in a holding pattern until the new projects bear fruit.

“Those are very hard decisions that the families are going to have to make on an individual basis,” Ferry said, recalling his own experience as a child with asthma.

“I can remember waking up and not being able to breathe,” he said. “The fear of that, the terror that it brings to someone, is real.”

As the legislative session closed in March, top Republican leaders touted their snowballing efforts to save the lake, noting they began in January by greenlighting the state’s purchase of a magnesium plant on the shore and ended with $60 million on its way from the federal government. In between those milestones, Trump piped up and certain conservation bills sailed through the lawmaking process.

“We could do more,” said Senate President Stuart Adams, R-Layton. “But that’s a lot.”

The Cardons are skeptical Utah leaders will do all that’s needed to save the lake. They said the state’s rapid growth is a concern, and so are its efforts pushing back on federal air pollution standards.

“It feels like it’s hard to get a straight answer about, do I have to leave? If I do, at what point do I have to leave? How bad does it have to get?” Adrienne Cardon said.

They want to ease their kids’ asthma symptoms, but also raise them in a community less vulnerable to the effects of climate change and with plenty of water for years to come.

Elliot, 12, said he believes the lake could have been protected a while ago but the state was slow to act.

“I think some people realize the consequences, but they just want to keep going, because they don’t want to lose their money or their houses,” he told Utah News Dispatch.

Graham, 5, said when the air’s thick with pollution, it’s “kind of like a peanut!” (He’s allergic.)

Alyssa May, a friend of the Cardons and a member of Mormon Women for Ethical Government, said a fellow member of the group recently moved out of state for the same reasons.

Gov. Spencer Cox set an ambitious goal to get the lake back in top shape for the 2034 Winter Olympics in Salt Lake City, requiring an additional 800,000 acre-feet of water each year. From 2021 to 2025, conservation efforts ended with half the new yearly goal — a total of 400,000 acre-feet — sent to Great Salt Lake.

“They are nowhere near on track,” said Brian Moench, president of Utah Physicians for a Healthy Environment and a retired anesthesiologist.

Moench is especially concerned about residue from mining, pesticides, nuclear testing and forever chemicals, along with tiny particles that even light winds could pick up from the lakebed.

“All the toxic byproducts of modern civilization are embedded in that dust,” he said.

Fortunately, about three-quarters of the lake is covered by a salt and clay crust, rather than dust, said Kevin Perry, a professor of atmospheric sciences at the University of Utah.

“That’s saving us right now,” Perry told Utah News Dispatch in February. He’s encouraged by the state’s “massive haul” on water policy and still primarily concerned about day-to-day pollution — such as poor wintertime air and wildfire smoke come summer — than intermittent storms over the lakebed.

Still, he wants answers. Researchers have identified health problems from other drying saline lakes, finding reduced lung function in children breathing dust from southern California’s Salton Sea. Perry didn’t see similar action in Utah and pressed the state in 2022 to thoroughly study and monitor the dust.

“I pushed really hard to try and get us to be able to answer those questions, because I don’t know the answer,” he said.

The state set aside $1 million for a new dust monitor network to detect, capture and analyze what’s blowing into communities. Crews are installing the devices now, with 10 monitors that will be up and running by the end of July, said Zach Aanderud, dust scientist and coordinator with the Utah Division of Air Quality.  

To date, Aanderud said, there is no published data on the concentration of heavy metals in dust falling on Wasatch Front communities, and there aren’t any guidelines on how exposure to the particles, for say, an afternoon, can affect a person’s short- or long-term health. He and a state working group are coming up with guidelines, compiling an initial set in the next four months.

In Orem, the Cardons acknowledge they’re making their decision to move from a place of privilege. Both work from home, he as a filmmaker and she in advertising. They said they hope to look back someday and realize they could have stayed, instead of returning to her home state of Kansas.

“That’s my new best case scenario: Utah got its act together,” Jared Cardon said. “They saved this amazing resource.”

As she packed boxes, Adrienne Cardon said in some moments she feels like Chicken Little, warning the sky is falling, and at others, her family seems to be the first out of a burning building.

“If it’s the former, I’ll feel a little foolish,” she said in a text message later that day. “If it’s the latter, I’ll feel useful that I pulled the fire alarm on the way out.”