Rubber Dust Regularly Peppers Southwest Brea

Residents in the southwestern edge of Brea say they are fighting off a black dust that stains their walls, covers their driveways and permeates heating and air-conditioning vents.

Above Emilee Hall’s living room couch, the dust from a large heating vent has marked the ceiling with black streaks, stoking her suspicion that the air she breathes slowed her recovery from recent surgery.

The same black deposits linger on her home’s exterior. It peppers her gray hair after a day outside, covers the garage door, the driveway and her husband’s truck.

“We’re afraid to have the vent cleaned out because we think it’ll break loose more of the particles,” she said.

Residents say the problem began in June 1996, after a city contractor repaved Arovista Avenue and neighboring streets. Some longtime residents said they soon noticed their homes became dusted with a black substance that returned almost as soon as it was wiped away.

Squirting down driveways and exterior walls with a hose only slowed the inevitable, they said: The deposits eventually build up somehow, somewhere.

But the contractor, while agreeing that a certain type of paving could cause particles to develop, said he had deliberately not used that type of paving, and that the problem was not caused by his work.

A study conducted by the South Coast Air Quality Management District in October found the black dust was rubber--most likely released from tires being worn down on the street.

Rubber is a common substance found in the air of car-obsessed Southern California, where an estimated 10 million vehicles grind their tires on roadways every day, officials added.

Bill Kelly, spokesman for the AQMD, said scientists testing the particles found them to contain traces of rubber that could be attributed to tire wear. He discounted residents’ claims that the dust was coming from the pavement instead.

“Particles from the road have a distinctive appearance under the microscope,” he said. “They have a halo that is caused by the tar surrounding the rubber.”

The particles were determined to be too large to cause health problems more serious than a runny nose, the agency said.

Brea City Councilman Steve Vargas thinks the dust comes from traffic traveling along nearby Imperial Highway. His home, also near the highway, had a similar problem before the city installed a sound wall in 1999, he said.

A 12-foot sound wall is being planned along Imperial Highway in the Arovista neighborhood and should be completed in the next few years. But Vargas said the wall wasn’t a reaction to complaints about black dust, but in response to another urban woe.

“We’re not putting up a sound wall for that,” he said. “We’re putting up a sound wall because of the noise.”

Hall has been living at her house at Carob Avenue and Arovista Street since her husband’s company built the neighborhood in 1954. In the 46 years they have lived there, Hall said she never experienced anything like the weekly cleaning she’s had to do since the street was worked on in 1996.

She doesn’t think traffic has increased noticeably on Arovista since then, so the agency’s explanation of the particles coming from tires doesn’t make sense.

Across the street and down three doors from Hall’s home, James Riley points to the black dust covering his truck on his driveway. Up and down Arovista Avenue, the dust follows a kind of hopscotch pattern that ducks in and out of side streets. Neighbors facing the easterly wind complain about their patios and pools being assailed by black dust. Other neighbors--mostly those farther away from Arovista Avenue or those on the western side of the street--haven’t noticed the problem.

Resident Dick Francesconi and other neighbors think the problem is caused by a bad mix of rubberized asphalt--a mix of old shredded tires and asphalt used to make a sturdier road that cuts down on friction noise.

“I’ve been here since 1954 and we’ve only had the problem in the last few years,” Francesconi said.

Doug Martin Contracting Co. performed the road slurry work on Arovista and surrounding residential streets in 1996. Martin said in no way, shape or form was rubber used in the mix he put down on any streets in Brea.

He said he stopped using “cold mix” rubberized road slurry in 1996, after he witnessed the disintegration of roads he paved in Los Angeles County and his own backyard. Martin said he was disturbed because he saw rubber particles falling into storm drains and going into the air.

Martin agrees with the traffic theory as a cause of the grimy dust. Martin, who also lives in Brea, said diesel truck traffic on Imperial Highway has definitely increased, and that the trucks barrel through adjoining neighborhoods on their way to grocery distribution centers and other warehouses.

Martha Gildart, a state engineer with the Integrated Waste Management Board, who manages the state’s tire recycling program, said it was hard to imagine even a heavily traveled rubberized road releasing particles so fine they could be carried into the air. The smallest, a particle of rubber from a heat-and chemical-treated rubberized road, would be about the size of a grain of rice, she said.

“The tires rolling down the street are more likely to be worn down than the road,” Gildart added.

However, Ed Grant, a contractor with Santa Ana-based Allstar paving, said he wouldn’t rule out the possibility that rubber was coming from the road.

“It is feasible,” he said.

City officials, meanwhile, have put the matter to rest. In a letter to Hall in 1999, city engineer Phil Wray said the particles were too large to pose a health problem--at least five times the size of particles known to cause health problems. He added that although the rubber particles appeared more concentrated in her neighborhood, it was no worse than in other regions of Southern California. In an interview, Wray said that the city hasn’t received similar complaints from other neighborhoods.

“We’ve talked to AQMD and we’ve asked their professional opinion,” he said. “They said that beyond being a curiosity, there was no reason to do more study.”

Regardless where the dust comes from, resident Francesconi says it’s there, and he’s not happy about it.

“If it’s not unhealthy, it sure is a nuisance,” he said.