AQMD Rule Makes Dust-Busting a Must

Southern California streets and skies should be cleaner under a new regulation approved Friday that requires all cities and counties in the region to improve their street sweeping and to control dust on unpaved roads.

Clouds of road dust are a major source of particulates, the microscopic pieces of pollution that can trigger serious respiratory problems and form a gritty, gray haze. Dust accounts for about a third of the particulates in the Los Angeles Basin and reducing dust is regarded as one of the cheapest and most effective ways to clean up the air here.

Two measures, approved unanimously Friday by the South Coast Air Quality Management District board, are designed to scrub the skies of an estimated 86 tons of particles every day.

The more sweeping mandate affects the upkeep of tens of thousands of miles of paved and unpaved roads in Los Angeles, Orange and nondesert portions of Riverside and San Bernardino counties.

Sweepers equipped with vacuums or filters capable of removing fine pieces of dust and silt will be purchased for paved streets, and many of the basin’s 4,600 miles of unpaved roads will be paved or subjected to other dust controls.

Also, under the second measure, construction sites, mines, farms and landfills will be required to boost their efforts to reduce dust.

The AQMD estimates that the measures will cost $10.6 million yearly, of which $8.8 million will be borne by the region’s 150 city and county governments.

At a time when local governments are already strapped for money, many mayors and other city officials opposed the rule, saying they will have trouble paying for the extra street maintenance.

“We are more than willing to comply as far as improving the quality of life of our citizens, but where are we going to get the money?” said Jane Williams, an associate traffic engineer for Moreno Valley near Riverside.

Although construction sites and landfills have faced AQMD dust requirements for years, this is the first time that the agency’s quest for clean air has turned to the massive amounts of road dust that loft up into the sky.

Every year from 1998 through 2006, each city and county must either pave one mile of unpaved road, apply dust suppressants such as polymers to two miles, or reduce speeds to 15 mph on three miles. The roads chosen are required to be among those that are the most well-traveled.

Of the basin’s 4,600 miles of unpaved roads, more than half are in Los Angeles County. Even the city of Los Angeles has some stretches of unpaved streets left.

Livestock operations, mostly in Riverside and San Bernardino counties, also are required under the new rule to pave or lay thick gravel on their private roads.

In addition, cities and counties must purchase special street sweepers that can suck up microscopic particles under 10 microns in diameter. They must also remove large areas of dust from paved roads within 72 hours of a windstorm, mudslide, truck spill or other event.

Today, most cities use broom sweepers, which many residents have long ridiculed as ineffective since they can stir up more dust than they pick up. But beginning in 1999, newly purchased equipment for use on roads where a lot of silt builds up must be vacuum sweepers or equivalent technologies for removing fine particles.

Vacuum sweepers cost $157,000 apiece compared with $120,000 for broom sweepers, and they are slower moving, so three of the new models are needed to replace two older ones.

Barb Garrett, a legislative analyst for Los Angeles, said vacuum sweepers are too slow to keep up the city’s usual pace of street cleaning without a substantially bigger investment in equipment and manpower.

But Garrett said the city, originally vehemently opposed to the rule, now supports it because the AQMD eased many earlier provisions, which would have required vacuum sweepers on all streets and paving of all dirt roads within 10 years. The AQMD also created a task force to ensure that more efficient and cheaper sweepers are available before the 1999 deadline.

“We still have some concerns about whether we will be able to maintain our existing operation and maintenance schedules, but we think we can work through the process,” Garrett said. “It [the rule] has public health benefits, which is the goal of the whole program.”

In Riverside and San Bernardino counties, where there are almost 1,300 miles of unpaved roads, city officials are especially worried about the requirements for dirt roads.

“We cannot support it totally because we see this as an unfunded mandate and an infringement on property rights,” said Ruthanne Taylor Berger of the Western Riverside Council of Governments, which represents 14 cities and the county. “With everything else going on with every city and local agency, finances are so tapped that they are having difficulty just maintaining the systems they have without adding to them.”

Pomona City Councilwoman Nell Soto, who represents Los Angeles County cities on the AQMD board, said she was worried, too, but voted for the rule after the AQMD pledged to help locate funding. Still, there were no guarantees Friday.

“We’re broke. All the cities are broke and we don’t know where we’ll get the money,” Soto said.

Under a separate measure also unanimously adopted, construction companies, mines and utilities must water dusty areas more often and clean up dust tracked from their sites. Farms must have soil erosion plans. Those requirements will cost businesses an estimated $1.8 million a year.

Federal law requires the AQMD to reduce airborne dust and achieve health limits for particulates--considered the deadliest type of air pollution since they can lodge in lungs. About one-third of particle pollution comes from dust, while the rest is largely from gasoline and diesel exhaust. Cleaning up road dust is one of the cheapest ways to reduce the pollutant.

“The Coachella Valley has already done this, and it’s cut their [particulates] down to within the limits, so we see no reason to assume similar things won’t work here,” said AQMD spokesman Bill Kelly.

AQMD Chairman Jon Mikels, a San Bernardino County supervisor, said the brunt of previous clean-air measures has hit private businesses, “so it’s incumbent upon local government to step forward and do their part in cleaning up the air.”

When Friday’s measures are fully implemented, they will eliminate about 25% of the 340 tons of dust per day blowing from roads, construction, agriculture and landfills, the agency says. The AQMD estimated the tonnage by measuring dust blown from a sampling of streets and extrapolating for the rest.

On paved roads, dust is formed when tires crush particles into finer pieces that spiral up into the air, where they sometimes hang for hours.

The Los Angeles Basin--especially the Riverside area--has the nation’s unhealthiest concentrations of particle pollution, sometimes reaching levels double the limit deemed healthful.

The new measures do little, if anything, to help the region comply with a controversial new limit on particulates that the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency proposed in November. Road dust is usually composed of coarser particles, while the new standard focuses on ultra-fine ones mostly coming from combustion.

The dust control, however, will go a long way toward satisfying the EPA’s limit on coarser particles, the AQMD says.

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Scrubbing the Streets

Road dust is an important source of particulates, the microscopic pollutants that create a gray haze over the Los Angeles Basin and can lead to respiratory problems. To reach the goal of eliminating 86 tons of particulate matter every day, cities and counties in the basin must control dust on unpaved roads and improve street cleaning.

SOURCES OF DUST

Paved roads: 50%

Unpaved roads: 15%

Construction: 13%

Windborne: 16%

Agriculture: 5%

Landfills: 1%

Total: 340 tons per day in L.A. Basin

Source: Air Quality Management District