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Regulators: Fixing What is Wrong With the Desert
So here I am in Arizona’s Valley of the Sun wondering just what all the hubbub is about. I remember Mays past, days of 110 degrees or more and yet, in the past couple of years it’s been downright pleasant, dry, 80s to low 90s during the day, 60s at night, and only one, perhaps two, days that eclipsed 100. I thought that temperatures were expected to rise, especially with the El Nino effect. No, not in May.
Of course we don’t really notice warming here in the desert. Misery is difficult to gauge as the mercury moves past 107.
We also suffer from poor air quality here in the desert, especially in the winter months. The jet stream moves north and the local atmosphere stills as it cools. We get a valley effect inversion that traps dust and smog in the surface air. Human activity contributes to this pollution, but much of this particulate, even ozone pollution, is naturally created. The desert is of course a dusty place.
Regulators carefully monitor and measure this pollution. I once heard a person from the AZ Department of Environmental Quality actually say, publicly, that desert dust was a man-made phenomenon. You see, in the wild, the nice desert forms a protective crust but when man comes along and disturbs that crust…
Madam, let me introduce you to this cloud formation we call a thunderhead. Did you know that Arizona is second only to Florida when it comes to thunderstorm activity? Thunderstorms create a headwind that in turn disturbs the soil and forms those massive dust storms we now call haboobs (a term borrowed from Iraq during Desert Storm.) Haboobs don’t care about no stinking crusts. We also have little funnel clouds called dust devils. If you look out onto the Sonoran plain on any afternoon you see dozens of dust devils. They love to kick up dust. And finally, there is the good old wind. When the Santa Anna’s blow in from California in the spring, expect dust in your eyes.
Nonetheless, our air is considered too dusty and polluted and men, unnatural as we all are, must be to blame. So fireplaces and leaf blowers are the devil. So are gas lawnmowers. Contractors must take extreme measures (including obtaining expensive AZDEQ permits) to keep down dust, which turns dust to mud, which is tracked into the street, which makes more dust, which generates fines which support the AZDEQ.
The feds are finally cutting us a little slack. They’ve admitted that “some” of our “pollution” is beyond our control; that it is naturally occurring. We are still required to burn special gas mixtures in summer and winter and we still face extraordinary dust control and air pollution regulations, but at least we don’t face massive EPA retaliatory measures. At least not yet.
The Indian Reservations consider themselves exempt from AZDEQ regulation by the way. And farmers are exempt. Plus Maricopa County still counts many of its rural roads as primitive; that is dirt. These roads are also exempt from regulation. Politics and pollution are hard to fathom.
Anyway, my friends, I just wanted you to know that the government is hard at work trying to make the Arizona desert less dusty and less hot. So far, they’ve been unsuccessful.
Published in General
And may they continue to be unsuccessful.
For their next project: make the ocean less wet. Good article, Doug.
Cool article. I don’t suppose people who live there could actually figure out water and soil management locally or at the state or water shed level. Washington technocrats are always better because they don’t have to pay the consequences if they’re wrong, nor spend their own money. This raises them to a higher wiser plain from which they can see the future more clearly.
As I’m running the dust cloth over the furniture every week and see it coming away black I wonder what my lungs look like!
Nevertheless, the weather this spring has been ideal for sipping mojitos on the patio.
Doug – that is a great photograph – did you take it?
It reminds me of my time working in Chad, Central Africa, with Exxon in the 1980’s. We were drilling in the Doba and Doseo Basins. We would crew-change out of N’Djamena on board a DC-3 or Twin Otter. This particular memory is from a Twin Otter. We were flying to N’Djamena in the late afternoon and the pilot shouted to us that we might want to make sure we were secure in our seats. As we approached N’Djamena were surrounded by an orange haze and were bounced around quite severely for about 10 minutes. Suddenly, it was like I was skiing off Scott’s Bowl in Park City, UT, and dropping off the cornice in a free fall. After dropping for what seemed like and eternity but was probably only a few seconds, and settling in my seat after having been pinned to the seat belt, and looking back at what happened, I saw your photo.
But thanks so much for making me feel guilty – I didn’t realize our two drilling rigs caused such environmental havoc. Perhaps you can connect me with the “good” folks at AZDEQ so that I can make amends and have them go after those polluters in Chad.
Resist calling them haboobs! It just seems like an outreach thing.
And Santa Ana winds blow IN to California from the Mojave.
In 2013, we were 11th most “free.”
But, yes, using water to keep down the dust in the desert is absurd.
A couple of years ago the EPA proposed regulations to mitigate dust produced from farming practices. They wanted to have water sprays dampening down the dust during planting and harvest.
That didn’t fly so well over here in Iowa. The reaction here was swift and outraged.
Perhaps Arizona officials could put together a blue ribbon panel of experts to study the feasibility of setting up a Dust Mitigation Commission within the Arizona Department of Environmental Quality that reports directly to the national Environmental Protection Agency.
Geeez! Don’t give them any ideas!
Should those EPA folk claim to have such power, let them stand before the sandstorms and command them to cease. They be lesser and more meddlesome Gods in fact. But being a Government employee in such places grants Invisible Powers don’t you see !
Maybe our Santa Annas too come from Mexico but we enjoy blaming California.
Ya think?
I wish I’d taken the photo, but it came from a local TV station.
WF – maybe if we lined up all the EPA bureaucrats and told them to whistle…
I just like anything with boobs.
What happened to Margaritas?
Doug
Just got back this afternoon from a three day trip in Phoenix. The last time I was in Phoenix was in 1985. What the heck have you guys done to the place? I think the population then was ~600K. It looks like LA right down to the over abundance of freeways, and the horizon to horizon mizmaze spread of featureless suburbs. I am afraid to do a day trip to Tucson to see what has happen to them on my next business trip to the area. (I expect to be going a few times a year to our newly contracted Spacecraft vendor in Gilbert).
The EPA folk are more like Donald Sutherland at the end of Pod People, ie: No Escape ! Had we invented RoundUp earlier on, dealing with invasive species and all that, therefore woe is us – Grinz –
I’m partial to mint!
When you live in a place as featureless as the Sonoran Desert, it’s tough to make it stand out. But we’re nothing like LA. Our central hub, downtown Phoenix, houses a few bankers, lawyers and accountants, but little else. Most folks work near home. The freeways are a godsend. When I moved here over 20 years ago getting around the Valley was brutal. Now I realize just how urbanized it is; everything is a half hour away for the most part. The entire urban area is no more than 40-50 miles across. Imagine this: I live in a nice suburban area with great schools 12 miles from the airport and 15 miles from Chase Field (downtown Phoenix.) It takes me 20 minutes to get to my office in traffic. Not bad at all.
Tucson is little changed.
It’s remarkably refreshing! (Cosmo Kramer.)
We are conservatives, not sure I like all of the changes. I could consider a retirement there just to get out of the DC mosh-pit (at least if feels that way on those 90 degree 90% RH dog days).
But I remember Phoenix as being “quaint” and how the town seem to have immediate boundaries with the desert when I was doing some after shift “walkabouts”. As for LA, I have spent way to much time there, literally the only thing they have going for them anymore is the weather. The sprawl is monotonous, and the freeways are always backed up. My arrive on Monday and traveling during your “rush” hour was illuminating of a future you all don’t want to become.
You can still find a peaceful spot here in AZ, you just have to look. Some of the communities just north of Tucson along the Catalinas have what you are looking for. East, near the Superstitions, also has some affordable desert properties. You just have to avoid the urbanized core.
It is nice though to have the sports franchises and activity that an urban area has to offer. You can have both here.
Good post, Doug! I still love the desert landscape, dust, heat and all!
I’ll always remember my Aunt Ann’s exclaiming to me “Cathy, the desert is alive!” She spent several years visiting Tucson after her daughter moved there. Their home opened onto the desert. She shared my passion for birding. I miss her . . and I still hear her passionate enthusiasm as she coaxed me to reconsider my opinion of deserts. She succeeded.
Robert E. Lee Clayton. Now he was a regulator.
I just got home from Scottsdale and saw this. The worst it got was 97.
There are two groups of regulators. One seeks to regulate human beings and the other seeks to regulate nature. Living about 28 miles north of Tucson and right up against the Santa Catalina mountains I know that the Sonoran Desert is a formidable force during the summer months.
I had to cut down a tree in the backyard because it was starting to push against the roof tiles of the house and was sending roots out to the foundation of the house. When the temperature is around 104 you work for about four hours a day. The project took me three days.
You can impose regulations on human beings but my money is on the Sonoran Desert winning the battle against the regulators.
I can easily imagine that human activity contributes to dust storms. I have no desert experience, but I have seen the desert from an airplane window. Huge tracts of scrublands are thoroughly marked up by the four-wheelers. People roaring around the desert for fun have undoubtedly contributed to the problem.
How much would be very hard to quantify, and I doubt if it is a large contribution, but I still think it amounts to what is probably a noticable fraction of the dust in the air.
Wonderful ted talks on desertification some years ago. After destroying the artisan cattle industry thinking it was to blame, then killing thousands of elephants thinking they were to blame, finally thought about how those African plains used to be filled by millions of grazing animals of all stripes and the land thrived. They were kept moving by predators, so they ate, pooped urinated and moved on. Turns out that was a great way to prevent desertification. Then there are natural deserts, not even BSing bureaucrats can pxss that into to grass. It’s best not to be too clever or too confident and never centralize solutions because if you’re wrong, which is usually the case, disaster is wide and seldom followed by learning.