It’s pretty obvious now. Nature didn’t intend for us to invade dry, barren tracts and fill them with millions of people. But that’s how things worked out, and today, long after the great southwestern desert cities have matured and long after we faced and conquered the technological challenge of supplying them with water and creature comforts, science is telling us that another huge environmental hurdle remains: the extremely unhealthy intensity of dust and sand. Fine particles of matter are blowing, swirling, settling, and being drawn into our lungs. Particles are being hurled into the breeze by every activity on the ground. In old western movies, posses gallop off across the sand, trailing a plume of dust-all very romantic and adventurous. But replace the posses with thousands of off-road enthusiasts in SUVs; think of incessant construction in American boomtowns; think of bulldozers, scrapers, front-end loaders, and backhoes tossing dirt around and sending it skyward; and the term of art is fugitive dust.Wherever this fugitive goes, it gets in someone else’s airspace. It settles in someone’s pool or someone’s lungs. The government is attempting to curtail the problem and enforce some control, but this part is not easy. Who kicked up this latest storm of particulate matter? How much should the perpetrator have to pay? How much of it meets a threshold to pose a health threat? Unlike human-made smokestack emissions, dust is quintessentially natural, ubiquitous, and constantly driven about by nature and by people. “Air,” concedes an expert in Texas charged with keeping it clean, “is extremely complicated.” Kevin Smith enforces dust control in the problematic environs of El Paso. “Even when you think you know the facts, you end up saying ‘Well, I only knew most of the facts,'” and it turns out there’s more to be explored, discovered, and evaluated. Smith and his scientific colleagues refer to themselves as “airheads”-their term of respect. Air is extremely complicated, and airborne dust is even more so because of air-quality standards and the dire health consequences of breathing organic dust. These intertwined issues make dust control politically difficult, contentious, and painful. This literally can be a life-and-death issue, and no one-shot inoculation or quick fix exists. Control measures must be effective. They must be modified to meet shifting conditions year by year. Dusty places are not necessarily consistent with each other, points out Charles Aldred of EPA’s Region 9 office in San Francisco, CA. “Some places have more wind. Some have more agriculture. Some have more unpaved roads.” Land topography, local commercial factors, the strains of rapid growth, population demographics, agricultural characteristics, water supplies, prevailing winds, local political values, and other issues come to bear on air, says Aldred, an environmental engineer in Region 9’s air-enforcement office (governing Arizona, California, Hawaii, and Nevada). The news isn’t all bad. Progress is being made in air-quality management practices, better dust suppressant formulas are on the market-“things that really work,” says Aldred. Ultimately both the definition of a dust problem and the prescribed solutions must be site-specific. As for enforcing the regimen that ensues, this too turns out to be tailored to each community, in a rapidly changing environment of new case law and legal theory. Killer Dust? Why It Is So Serious Wind-whipped dust is a visual annoyance-even a road hazard at times-but the core issue really is medical. Epidemiology and pulmonary research are heightening the level of urgency about desert dust and the need for its containment. According to Kevin Hamilton, the asthma program coordinator for Community Medical Center in Fresno, CA, and a member of Medical Advocates for Healthy Air (MAHA), studies show that particulate matter “causes reduced lung function; aggravates lung diseases, including asthma; slows normal lung development in all children under 14; and causes premature death. Particulate pollution is the most harmful form of air pollution to the human lung.” The Environmental Working Group, a public-interest watchdog group, claims that airborne soot and dust “cause or contribute to the deaths of more Californians than [do] traffic accidents, homicide, and AIDS combined.” This is claimed in statements posted on the Web site of Earthjustice, a California-based legal advocacy group. Earthjustice’s Vanessa Stewart explains that asthma cases in the state’s woefully dusty San Joaquin Valley region have reached pandemic proportions. “One in six children there suffers from asthma,” she says. This is double the national average. One in eight adults also gets asthma, and the number of severe asthmatic attacks leading to emergency-room admissions there is skyrocketing. Earthjustice and several other nonprofit organizations have filed multiple lawsuits against EPA and various air-quality authorities relating to the valley’s health crisis, hoping to raise public awareness and government response. In 2002, a multipage insert in The Fresno Bee explored health problems and air quality, after which, as Stewart recounts, air-quality concerns vaulted past every other social problem to become “the most serious topic of concern in California’s central valley.”The dust control challenge there stems largely from valley agriculture. The Clean Air Act (CAA) exempted farming from dust control rules because of political and economic implications. In this particular California garden spot measuring thousands of square miles, however, agriculture accounts for about 25% of the dust, and dirt roads specifically used by farmers (therefore also exempted) add another 25%, according to Earthjustice figures. In October 2003, EPA conditionally approved the San Joaquin Air Quality Management District’s (AQMD’s) latest dust control plans for nonagricultural sources, such as unpaved roads and construction work, but agriculture-accounting for half of the dust – still was exempted. EPA now is being sued for this decision by three groups: MAHA, Latino Issues Forum, and the Sierra Club. According to Stewart, newly revised plans for implementing dust control on valley agriculture now are imminent.Regarding San Joaquin, Aldred comments, “It’s just not politically feasible for us to be going out in fields and saying, ‘Your plowing is causing dust.'” San Joaquin poses, he believes, “a much tougher problem.” Construction Contractors Face Dust-Busting “Gestapo”Although San Joaquin is a worst-case example, it is not alone in the magnitude of its problem, nor are residents of other dust-ridden sites lacking in alarm and activism. Southern California (encompassing Los Angeles and the south-coast area to the Mojave Desert), Las Vegas and Reno, NV, Phoenix, AZ, and several other sites have been mobilized and traumatized about dust. High-population areas are home to hundreds of thousands if not millions of sufferers from asthma, valley fever, and other lung ailments either caused or exacerbated by fugitive dust. Meanwhile agriculture in these areas (also originally exempted) inevitably will be phased into legal oversight again; though good for sufferers, that will present an unprecedented challenge for communities politically, commercially, and administratively.Meanwhile dust control enforcement-in the form of fines, penalties, delays, and added labor expenses-is a new cost factor and sometimes a severe inconvenience to construction-and-demolition firms, landscapers, and highway road departments. One dust-suppressant vendor in California, who asks that his name not be used, reports, “Out here, local contractors refer to the air-quality board as ‘the Gestapo'” because local inspectors have the authority to close down work sites and often do. He adds, “Dust control is really necessary here, but it’s very, very stringent. We’re in a desert with a booming construction market. They [the air-quality district] will write you a ticket, and you have to cease construction for that day if you get a ticket. There are a lot of contractors complaining, but there are a lot more who’d rather have their local air-quality branch continue doing this than have the EPA come in. You don’t want the EPA to have an office in your city. And we’re on the verge of that here because we failed to make dust containment.”Of CAA, SIPs, and FIPs The terms failed containment and nonattainment refer to provisions in the 1971 CAA, as amended in 1990. Originally aimed at smokestacks and tailpipes, CAA actually monitors seven air categories, with particulate matter (PM) composing one subset. Airborne debris measuring 10 µm (the width of a human hair) or smaller is known as “PM 10.” When resulting from human activity and migrating away from private airspace, PM 10 becomes fugitive dust. A smaller particle size, PM 2.5, covers smoky and sooty exhaust. These two sizes, PM 10 and PM 2.5, respectively correspond to organic particles-of more concern for erosion control issues – and inorganic particles-of more concern to combustion producers. Both are likely to impact construction firms.