The almost feral high-desert and mountain terrain profoundly shapes everyone who lives here. But it takes a special sensitivity to realize just how fragile that environment is. Torres has that sensitivity and earned not one but two associate degrees in the environmental sciences from Salt Lake Community College.
But career tracks have a life of their own, it would seem, and during a five-year stint beginning as an intern with an environmental health and safety consulting firm, Torres was tasked with an interesting and, it turned out, a transformational project related to the demolition of a smelter.
For many years in Salt Lake Valley the iconic Murray smokestacks stood like silent sentinels to the past when the duo — one of which was 450-feet tall above the former smelter — attempted back in the first half of the 20th century to lift smoke filled with lead and arsenic away from the population below.
For Torres it was the spectacular demolition and clean-up of these mid-valley landmarks that marked her foray from her training and her ambition to “try to save the world,” as she says, to the more formalized sector of environmental health and safety (EHS).
“While I was there [at the consulting firm], I got a lot of cross-training in the health and safety side of things,” she recalls. At the old Murray smelter site, her job was to do the environmental monitoring of the project, determining dust levels and making sure there wasn't cross contamination into other areas. “I got into the safety or the IH [industrial health] side of things because I started conducting exposure assessments on employees rather than the environment.”
It wasn’t just the training Torres got as the stacks came down; it was an ethic of occupational safety for individuals, an ethic that continues to this day.
This formative experience led Torres not only to a bachelor’s degree but to work in 2004 as a compliance officer at the state-level Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA). Under the OSHA law created by the U.S. Congress, employers are responsible for providing a safe and healthful workplace for their workers. “I was so excited to go into the regulatory side of things,” she says, “because as a consultant we're always trying to help the employer comply with the regulations.”
Torres later advanced at OSHA to the position of an industrial hygienist, involved in identifying, evaluating and controlling hazards that can affect the health of workers, including chemical, physical, ergonomic, or biological exposures. Then, in 2004, she decided to try her luck at the federal level and found herself a consumer safety officer at the Food and Drug Administration.
Christin Torres
“I never imagined that I would work in safety,” says Torres. “I didn't know that safety and the environmental sciences went together, but they absolutely do. If you had asked me 'what are you going to be when you grow up?' it wouldn't have been a compliance officer or an occupational safety specialist.”
Except for a stint as a massage therapist for a few years prior to the pandemic, Torres has stayed in the field of health and safety where she discovered what she likes about it: researching federal and state regulations. In February she joined the Environmental Health and Safety department at the University of Utah as a compliance specialist. “I absolutely love doing research on regulations and interpretations and how they apply to this situation and how I can hold my employer accountable and to ask for corrective actions,” she says.
While Torres found what she liked about the work of EHS, she never lost track of the “why” in her career — the real motivation to learn, for example, the ins-and-outs of laboratory safety which is a new aspect of her work in compliance at a research university. Whether saving a personified Mother Earth as an idealistic youth, protecting Salt Lake Valley residents from the demolition of a toxic smelter, or, later, facilitating healing through massage, her work, currently in compliance, has been designed to help and protect others.
“This sounds grandiose,” she says, “but I really am helping people make it home every day … I'm helping employers or students who are employees become aware of their surroundings, teaching them how to do things safer so that they can go home to their family everyday with all of their fingers and [both] … their arms, being able to breathe normally because they didn't breathe in something accidentally and ruin their lungs… . If you're changing the way an employer does their business to make it a safer place to work the potential to save a life is high, in my opinion.”
Just talking with Christin Torres with her easy laugh and penchant for regulatory detail will make you feel safer.