Dust Control

The efforts of the Environmental Protection Agency to be everything to everybody are beginning to have the ring of an old Randy Travis song; you know, the one that bemoans that the road to hell is often paved with good intentions. In giving this agency the benefit of the doubt one would like to think that they do have the best of intentions, but one would also have to question whether good old common sense has taken a back seat to those “good intentions”. Case in point, the EPA’s efforts to regulate dust levels in urban and rural areas at first may seem like a fairly good idea, but on closer examination it’s a Pandora’s Box just waiting to be opened. Excessive dust in urban areas is generally produced by construction, demolition or excavation; in rural areas dust is produced by farmers working the soil, traffic on gravel roads and livestock. Granted, they have delegated to individual states the authority to monitor and enforce air quality standards. It remains to be seen whether states will govern this with rational and practical consideration, or lose to radical design.