Arizona Hopes Dust Storms Shutting I-40 Have Ended

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Arizona transportation and public safety officials said they hope whatever caused severe dust storms that closed a stretch of Interstate 40 at least 10 times in the past two months has run its course.

The most recent of the highway closures, on May 22-23, lasted almost 10 hours, said Mackenzie Nuno, spokeswoman for the Arizona Department of Transportation.

“Certainly, everyone is hoping it doesn’t happen again, but we’re checking every day,” Nuno said.

The closures on such a critical transportation artery have snarled freight and thrown delivery schedules into turmoil, said Karen Rasmussen, president of the Arizona Trucking Association.

“The problem is that there really isn’t a detour other than going into a part of the [Apache and Zuni Indian] reservations or into areas that are really not designed for truck traffic,” Rasmussen said.

I-40 connects the North Carolina coast to Southern California, where thousands of trucks haul loads from the ports of Los Angeles and Long Beach, Calif.

“The issue we have here, with a lot of traffic going into the L.A. basin, is you have very tight delivery windows in L.A.,” Rasmussen said. “If you can’t make your appointment, then it’s really difficult to try to get anything rescheduled.”

The issue gets worse when drivers heading to Los Angeles not only miss their delivery time there but also miss their pickup time for the load they are hauling back east, Rasmussen said.

“There are days when nearly half the overall traffic on I-40 is commercial trucks,” said Nuno. “It is the interstate with the highest average percentage of truck traffic” in Arizona.

According to ADOT traffic records, more than 7,000 trucks a day travel the stretch of I-40 affected by the dust storms, Nuno said.

State officials have said they are baffled by the clouds of dust that periodically have enveloped the highway along a 50-mile stretch between Flag-staff and Winslow to the east.

There is no way to prevent the storms, Nuno said, but ADOT has set up a monitoring system with the National Weather Service that tracks winds hourly so that the state at least can warn travelers if a closure is

imminent.

Nuno said the Weather Service has told the state that the dust storms appear when a certain type of pressure system collides with southwesterly winds.

Northern Arizona, where the blinding dust storms have struck, is known for high winds, but the dust storms began only last year, then severely escalated this year, officials said.

“It takes visibility down to zero,” said Arizona Highway Patrol Sgt. Kevin Wood, spokesman for the state Department of Public Safety.

Wood said he has been on the force for 31 years and, until last year, never saw I-40 closed for dust storms.

For truckers, a lack of rest stops exacerbates the situation, Rasmussen said. The state recently closed 13 highway rest stops because of severe budget problems, meaning truckers stranded by the storms are forced to line highway off-ramps until the dust lightens up.

Law enforcement officials are so worried about the dangers of the ramp parking, however, that they began putting up cones to block off those potential parking areas, too, Rasmussen said.

“There just isn’t any place for them to go,” she said.

ADOT’s Nuno said that advance warning is the best help the state can give truckers and other travelers. For the most recent storm, warnings went out as early as four days ahead of the event, she said.

The state also set up the dust-storm roadblocks as close to Flagstaff and to Winslow as possible, at locations where trucks have room to turn around and, Nuno said, they can get back to the towns and to shelter.