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Arizona Rising

"I thought he would cough his life away," Rose Terence says. "As a newborn he went back and forth to the hospital and almost died." Five years later, in 1946, her son Malcolm's pediatrician advised a move from Peoria, Ill. to heal his bronchitis. Like the infamous dentist and gunfighter Doc Holliday did in 1872 to cure his consumption, the Terence family joined the caravan of emigrants who for over a hundred years, have been leaving the Midwest and East for the curative powers of cities like Phoenix and Tucson.

Malcolm had better luck than Doc Holliday, who died; Malcolm's bronchitis healed quickly in Arizona's clean, dry air. But Tucson and Phoenix have changed. Water is a problem in the desert, and as the populations of Western cities grow, so do the handicaps of growth.

The Arizona Comparative Environmental Risk Project, in their 1995 study, ranked air quality, by far, the No. 1 issue in the state.

Tuberculosis sufferers came to Sunnyslope, now part of Phoenix, from the 1930s to the '50s and camped out in tents, to recover in its healthy climate. "Well, I don't believe today they could do that," says Elaine Potter, 67, a Phoenix resident since 1946, "because of the air."

Terence, 76, walks each morning before the heat rises. She looks like a Westerner. Her tanned face, framed with curly gray hair, has lines from the sun, and the heat and 50 years of desert air have kept her slim and curvy.

Tucson had 40,000 people when the Terences bought "a little adobe house, made of the dirt from the back yard," on a dusty road north of the city 50 years ago. The neighborhood was mostly empty land with two or three houses on the block. Now it's in the center of town.

"Tucson really is booming," says Rebecca Olson, 44, who has lived in Tucson for 25 years, long enough to have deep roots. "Something big is being built all the time." The words come slow and easy. "There is more traffic all year long."

"Growth, without a doubt, is the biggest problem facing Phoenix-uncontrolled growth," says Sandy Bahr, legislative liaison for the Arizona Audobon Council. "All other problems stem from it. I feel like saying to the leaders, 'It's the growth, stupid. It's the growth.'"

"Every time there's a bad winter back east ... people throw their snow shovels in the Dumpster and move here," says Jim Matthews, Arizona Department of Environmental Quality. "We're going to get a bumper crop this year."

Maricopa County's (Phoenix) population was 186,193 and Pima County (Tucson) had 72,425 people in 1940. By 1994, the numbers had increased to 2,355,900 and 728,425.

Population growth parallels levels of air pollution in the state, and although air quality overall is better today than it was 10 years ago, according to the Department of Environmental Quality, there is haze in Tucson's sky and a brown cloud over Phoenix about two months a year.

The brown cloud that hangs over the Valley from about Thanksgiving to February, is due to thermal inversion-when dirty, cold air is trapped beneath a bowl of warm air.

"The bad air depends on the deviation between clear, cold nights and warm, sunny, hot days," says David Feuerherd, Program Director of the American Lung Association in Phoenix. "The fumes from two million autos starting up stays at ground level. Sunny, warm days three to four days in a row-you're ripe for an air quality disaster."

According to ACERP, particulate material less than 10 microns (10 millionths of a meter), called PM-10, is the "most biologically threatening to humans" because they are small enough to reach the lungs.

Congress is saying the money spent on air pollution hasn't worked, and they want to shut down or cripple the Environmental Protection Agency, according to Feuerherd. But twice as many cars on the road and less pollution disproves their hypothesis. "Government works in this instance," says Feuerherd. "We are not throwing our money down a rat hole."

If the lower California standards for PM-10 were attained (40% of EPA standards), the estimated yearly economic health benefits reduction for Maricopa County would be $275 million; Pima County, $650,000, Los Angeles County, $1.96 billion; and San Francisco County, $15 million.

The average health costs due to air pollution per person per year according to the lung association are $130 per person in Maricopa County, $1 in Pima County, and $220 in Los Angeles County.

"The thing that's causing the gains in air particulates to be swallowed up is urban sprawl," says Rob Smith, Phoenix Sierra Club Director.

"There was a population increase in Pima County of 24,000 in 1995 and a projected increase of 16,000 in 1996," says Dan Anderson of the Tucson Metropolitan Chamber of Commerce. "Tucson, for this year, approved 4,433 building single family dwelling permits and 2,573 multiple family dwellings."

A mile or two west of Tucson, on the way to Tucson Mountain Park, bulldozers have clearcut land for a subdivision. Grown palo verde trees wait in large wooden planter boxes, and some remaining saguaros, 8-10 feet tall (50-75 years old), have been tagged with colored plastic ribbons for replanting.

"People certainly are concerned about development," says Anderson. But if you don't grow, you die. It's a Catch-22,"

Terence says she is most affected by increased population and more cars on Tucson's roads. "If they don't watch out they're going to end up like Phoenix." And in Phoenix, Bahr says, "Look at L.A. to see what more freeways get you. People say, 'We've got to stop doing this or we're going to be another L.A.'"

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