Rapidly Growing Phoenix Finds Dust Unsettling : Sprawl: Development run amok is leading to dirty air, creating serious health and environmental problems.

Bonnie Eich and her neighbors on Orchid Lane were fed up. Dust billowed up from the dirt road in their unincorporated neighborhood on the outskirts of Phoenix. Trucks racing to nearby construction sites were creating huge dust clouds.

“We wanted our kids to be able to play outside, but the dust was everywhere,” Eich said. “I’ve had valley fever, my daughter has asthma, everybody who lives here has a health problem.”

When the county balked at paving the road, everyone on Orchid Lane pitched in $1,700 each to pave it themselves. The two-lane strip of asphalt cost the residents more than $50,000, but it allowed them to reclaim their air.

Phoenix’s astonishing growth has created a pesky fallout--dust. Officials in the Valley of the Sun call it “fugitive dust,” and it has become public enemy No. 1. An innovative dust removal industry is thriving--locked in daily battle to eradicate what has become a serious health threat.

The brown cloud that clings to Southwestern cities such as Albuquerque and Denver regularly engulfs Phoenix like a grainy veil. A Phoenix-based poll earlier this year found that 51% of Arizonans blame air pollution as the source of their breathing and vision problems.

While city and county officials are spending millions on dust abatement measures and scrambling to control growth, more and more houses are sprouting in the Sonoran desert that rings Phoenix. More than one-third of the city’s homes were built in the last 10 years.

For as long as anyone can remember, Los Angeles has represented all that is detested here, yet Phoenix has slipped inexorably into L.A.’s familiar patterns of traffic snarls, suburban sprawl and developers plowing under farmland to throw up stucco starter homes.

Now the air here has been deemed so foul that the Environmental Protection Agency has stepped in under court order to force the city and county to clean it up. The action begat a massive road-paving program, among other measures, to inhibit the region’s prodigious dust production, a problem that has serious health implications.

Phoenix’s air quality is well below national health standards, and its violations for particulates, ozone and carbon dioxide have been classified as “serious,” a distinction shared with only one other city: Los Angeles.

The air problems stem in large part from the continuing population spurt: Phoenix is now the nation’s fastest-growing large city. At 1.3 million, it is now ranked 7th. Surrounding Maricopa County has a 23% growth rate, with more than 700,000 people moving here since 1990.

The ills of unchecked growth are the hot button issues of the moment and the subject of intensive local and state debate. And dust has become at once a metaphor, and a symptom, of this swelling development.

‘Growing Smarter,’ or Out of Control?

At 500 square miles, Phoenix is already larger than L.A. and is still gobbling land through annexation. It gained 5 square miles last year. What land it doesn’t absorb, it redefines: The city lost 40% of its farmland from 1990 to 1995.

As a city, Phoenix has both enthusiastically embraced development and abhorred its consequences. Last November, Arizona voters spoke loud and clear and passed Proposition 303, calling for $220 million to be set aside over 11 years to purchase land to protect it from development.

Endless committees, task forces and blue ribbon panels have examined the issue over the years and there’s still no discernible policy. Republican Gov. Jane Dee Hull calls “sensible growth” a priority and labels this approach “growing smarter.” The commission she charged with planning the state’s growth completed a report that reached her desk Thursday. It is believed to call for changes in the management of land held in state trust.

State Rep. Carolyn Allen (R-Scottsdale) helped prepare the report. The plain-talking Allen freely admits growth has not so much been characteristic of industry in Phoenix as the industry itself.

“There is a great suspicion that the Legislature is a toothless tiger on growth. I don’t think it’s an unfounded notion,” she said.

John Benton is a valley architect specializing in urban infill, a term for developing in the center city. He said politicians may superficially address the concerns of citizens who complain about sprawl, but behind the scenes they coddle the state’s huge developers who are plowing under pristine desert acreage on the northern and western edges of Phoenix, where land is cheap.

“Growing Smarter is the Legislature’s way of doing things without making Del Webb angry,” he said of Arizona’s largest builder.

Benton considers most of the current planned communities sprouting on the fringes of Phoenix to be “soulless” and decries the now-standard growth policy of luring a large population to the edge of a city, beyond the reach of existing public services and businesses.

“We should draw concentric circles around our cities and make the developers pay to extend services to the perimeter--schools, retail, driving time, roads and the resultant pollutants,” Benton said. “Development fees on the perimeter should be 4X and the infills should be minus 2X. The way it is now, infill pays for the sprawl.”

Phoenix was second in the nation in housing starts last year, and as sprawl continues its march into Arizona’s remote corners, some envision a future with wall-to-wall planned Spanish-style communities--effectively placing the entire state under a red tile roof.

“The reality is the Sierra Club has all the good sound bites on their side. The developers don’t have any,” said Diane McCarthy, co-chairwoman of the county’s Valley Vision 2025 planning group. “Planners need to see Phoenix as the megalopolis it has become, a la Los Angeles.”

To be sure, Phoenix’s growth has something to do with the city’s 4% unemployment rate, its revitalized downtown, healthy opera, symphony and theater companies and a recent ranking as the No. 1 city in the nation for small business start-ups. And the emigres help to add diversity to Maricopa County, which is still 79% white.

But the challenges only mount: Maricopa County’s population is expected to more than double by 2035.

Dust’s Serious Side Effects

Phoenix is teeming with those whose only job is to fight the dust battle. Pool cleaners, air-conditioning repairmen and house cleaners all report that their lives are made more miserable by dust, even as their livelihoods benefit.

An entire bureaucracy exists within local government to dust off dust. Maricopa County has a Dust Hot Line, which receives 1,400 calls a year. Gaye Knight, the air quality advisor for the city of Phoenix, said her office receives 5,000 complaints a year about fugitive dust. Since the EPA crackdown last year, Knight says, the city has paved 70 miles of roads and spent more than $12 million in dust abatement programs.

Dust is being viewed less as a housekeeping chore and more as a serious environmental problem. Officials say that 75% of the dust is created by humans, mainly from agriculture and construction.

The county even sends teams into the schools to teach children dust-control techniques and health guidelines. “We’ve come a long way in people understanding that dust is a problem,” Knight said.

A 1995 study estimated that 963 Arizonans a year die prematurely of respiratory ailments from inhaling particulates. Another study found that in areas where fine dust levels are consistently high, life expectancy among heart patients may be reduced by as much as two years. The EPA and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention found a 10% increased risk of mortality among babies living in cities with high levels of particulate pollution.

Children and the elderly are most at risk for dust-related health problems, as are asthma sufferers--the very demographic that flocks to Arizona’s warm, dry climate.

Valley fever, an illness whose symptoms can range from fatigue to fungus in bones or the lining of the brain, is a pathogen that lives quietly in the ground until soil is disturbed. The number of cases in Arizona has doubled in recent years, and the cost of hospitalizing valley fever patients has been put at more than $20 million.

Of course, dust problems are not new in Arizona, and some suggest that simply growing up in the desert might lead to valley fever. But blaming the landscape is not the answer, says Howard Wilshire, a former senior scientist for the U.S. Geological Survey.

“Undisturbed desert does not create large quantities of dust,” he said. “A natural crust of algae and lichen forms in the desert and it stabilizes the soil. The problem is man. We are being exceedingly foolish with our abuse of the desert.”

Need for Cleanup Spawns an Industry

Lou Snow is one of Phoenix’s dust busters with his 10-year-old business, Dust Pro. Snow provides dust abatement on vacant lots, dirt roads and construction sites. Business has been booming since the EPA’s mandates, one of which now requires dust control measures on any plot of ground larger than a tenth of an acre.

Among the methods Snow employs is spraying organic stabilizers on soil that bind with dirt to keep dust down. Snow is passionate on the topic and about what he views as the colossal waste of water, popularly used as a dust inhibitor here.

Watching two water trucks trudge through an immense sand and gravel yard in south Phoenix, Snow points to the spray that barely wets the dusty road as the sun blares down. “You can time how long it works on your second hand,” he said dismissively.

Snow’s quick calculation of the water usage to suppress dust at this one site comes to 64,000 gallons a day. The multiplying effect across the valley makes the construction industry one of the state’s biggest water guzzlers.

With Maricopa County bringing its number of dust inspectors to nine as part of its compliance measures, more water trucks are likely to be pressed into action, especially at Phoenix’s myriad construction sites.

At one such rambling site, Curtis Rogers sits in the dusty cab of his water truck, fingering a grimy bologna sandwich. A fine layer of dust covers him. When he gestures in conversation, the dust rises like a mist.

The 33-year-old is philosophical about the growth and dust debate that is roaring around him.

“It’s pretty clear if we didn’t keep growing the way we are here, building and building, we wouldn’t have such a dust problem,” he said, shrugging. “But it doesn’t bother me that much. It’s called job security.”

Researcher Belen Rodriguez contributed to this story.