Winds Kick Up More Than Dust in Desert : Environment: Antelope Valley residents complain about developers stripping vegetation and piling dirt near excavations. Drought has exacerbated the conditions.

Carolyn Kott and many of her neighbors on the east side of Palmdale feel like they’re fighting a losing battle. The enemy is dirt, and they say they can’t seem to keep it out of their homes, off their cars or from muddying their pools.

Ever since developers several months ago stripped the vegetation from several large lots nearby, residents in the Antelope Valley neighborhood say they have had to live with clouds of dirt blown by the high desert’s winds. Housecleaning has become virtually futile.

“I’ve just gotten so disgusted,” said Kott, standing with her husband on their dirt-covered back-yard patio. “It doesn’t do any good. I’ll clean this up, and it will be like this again in a few days. You just can’t seem to keep ahead of it.”

Although severe, the problems in Kott’s Palmdale neighborhood are hardly unique. Few places or people in the high desert this year have escaped being blanketed by the onslaught of dirt and sand that residents say is the worst they have seen in decades.

Blustery winds are nothing new to the high desert, but this year they have combined with a record fourth year of drought, a decline in the amount of acreage devoted to crops and the clearing of land for development to strip the soil from the valley.

Last month, the South Coast Air Quality Management District conducted a public hearing about the desert’s dust problems and decided to extend for another 18 months its monitoring of air quality in the area. AQMD officials said, however, that the amount of dust in the Antelope Valley’s air does not exceed federal standards.

Several of the 40 valley residents who attended the meeting disagreed with that assessment and said the experts’ monitoring techniques have failed to detect the seriousness of the problem.

In developed parts of the valley, where other structures or landscaping offer some protection from the wind and dirt, residents still have been forced to cover their pools and cars, and weatherproof their houses. Contact lens wearers have suffered from irritated and watery eyes.

In areas exposed to the open desert or near construction sites, the problems have been more severe, forcing people indoors and covering their houses, furniture and floors with a layer of fine-grained dust and sand. For some, it has caused health problems to worsen. For almost everyone, it’s meant a lot of cleaning up.

“The dirt gets on the sidewalks and the entrance way, and all over the house,” said George Greene, a retired Lancaster aerospace engineer who blames developers for the severity of the dust problems and officials in Lancaster and Palmdale for failing to respond.

The worst conditions have arisen near the rapidly growing area’s many construction sites, where the ground cover has been removed and dirt is piled next to excavations. Residents say their complaints, however, aren’t bringing any action.

The Antelope Valley’s two largest cities, Lancaster and Palmdale, have ordinances requiring construction sites to be dampened with water to control dirt and dust. But residents say the cities are slow to respond to complaints, and watering is, at best, a temporary solution.

City officials say they and developers do what they can but admit it’s difficult. “Out here, trying to keep dust down in heavy winds is impossible. It’s a fact of life unless you stop all of the construction” or plant grass everywhere, said Roy Stilson, a Palmdale public works inspector.

Meanwhile, some city and construction industry officials complain that another cause of the sandstorms has been animals that destroy vegetation by overgrazing vast areas of rangeland in the far west Antelope Valley. Occasionally powerful westerly winds then sweep up the dirt and deposit it miles away on city streets.

The drought also has been a major factor, leaving the region bone-dry and choking off desert vegetation that might otherwise have kept the topsoil in place. As a result, large sections of the valley have become virtual sand dunes.

The same phenomena also have occurred this year in other Southern California desert areas. Because of unusually strong winds and dry conditions, heaps of blowing sand have closed roads and frustrated residents in the Riverside County communities of Palm Desert, Cathedral City and Rancho Mirage.

Already this year in the Antelope Valley, at least half-a-dozen windstorms with gusts up to 60 m.p.h. have raised towering clouds of sand and dirt and reduced visibility in some places to near zero, causing dozens of traffic collisions.

The conditions have also alarmed officials at Palmdale’s commercial airport and the area’s two military airports, Plant 42 in Palmdale and Edwards Air Force Base to the north. Officials there fear the blowing dirt could interfere with flight and testing activities.

Large sandstorms have swept over the entire valley sporadically this year. But localized dust problems have occurred far more frequently near construction sites where even average-strength winds can pick up dirt exposed by excavations. Although smaller in scale, the dirt problems near construction sites can be intense, with mini-sand dunes piling up almost over night on front lawns.

Marie Wells said she knew nothing about such conditions when she and her husband moved from the South Bay to buy their first home in Lancaster about 1 1/2 years ago. The young couple picked a house built across from a vacant lot and soon discovered open spaces aren’t always an amenity.

Dirt kicked up by a house builder on that property enveloped the neighborhood and forced the family to spend thousands of dollars to seal windows, replace carpeting and drapes and even repaint their new home’s sandblasted exterior.

Last month, the Wellses and 10 other families were each awarded $1,850 in what Lancaster officials said was the first criminal case in the region in which a developer had been ordered to pay homeowners for damages caused by blowing dirt.

Dana Harold Smith of the Costa Mesa-based Rialto Development Co. pleaded no contest to one misdemeanor count under the city’s ordinance and was ordered to begin paying each of the families in $100-a-month installments. But Wells said the families have yet to receive any money.