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When the wind blows: How El Paso’s intense dust storms threaten our health, future [1]
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Date: 2025-05-11
The historically intense dust storms El Paso has experienced this spring could become the norm if record-setting heat and years-long drought persist in the borderland, according to scientists researching the cause and effects of the blowing dust and sand.
By most measures, the dusty season this year is the worst El Paso has experienced at least since the 1930s Dust Bowl – the series of droughts paired with poor soil management practices led to horrendous dust storms and triggered an exodus of Americans out of the drought-stricken regions.
The city has experienced almost 24 hours of brownout conditions in recent months, the bouts of blowing dust and sand so intense that one can’t see more than a few hundred yards ahead.
Forecasters expect another series of blowing dust storms to hit El Paso from Tuesday through Friday. Average wind speeds so far this month have been slightly below the historical average, but the National Weather Service predicts gusts will top 40 miles per hour next week.
From 2000 through 2021, El Paso experienced a total of 23.5 hours of brownout dust storm conditions.
That means the city has seen more dust in the last couple of months than it did over that 22-year period, according to Thomas Gill, an Earth system and environmental scientist who is a professor at the University of Texas at El Paso.
A passenger airliner descends into El Paso during an intense dust storm on April 27, 2025. (Courtesy Aubrey Rumore)
Air quality monitors in El Paso tell a similar story.
A monitoring station at Hueco Elementary School in Socorro shows the daily average concentration of small particulate matter – called PM 2.5 – at nearly 64 micrograms per cubic meter this year. That’s well above what the Environmental Protection Agency considers an unhealthy level of particulate pollution for anyone to be exposed to.
“This year has been really, really bad for dust. In some ways, the worst since the Dust Bowl almost 90 years ago,” said Gill, the region’s leading authority on the science of dust and sand. “If the drought continues and we don’t get a series of wet years, dust will probably continue to be bad – but hopefully not as much as this spring.”
The region has experienced intense drought amid the driest two-year period here since the mid-1930s. And so far this year, El Paso has seen just a half-inch of rainfall. Usually by this time of year the city experiences, on average, 1.3 inches of precipitation, according to the National Weather Service.
And 2023 and 2024 were the two hottest years ever recorded in El Paso.
So, historic heat has further dried out already-parched vegetation, leaving little organic material to anchor dust and sand to the ground in the areas surrounding El Paso.
On top of the heat and lack of rainfall, this year has been unusually windy across the entire United States. Average wind speeds in El Paso in March were 11.7 miles per hour, the strongest since 1964, Gill said. But there’s no consensus among scientists about why this year has been windier than normal.
A recent study Gill helped author found dust storms have wide-ranging economic effects, such as disrupting road transport when blowing sand limits visibility, dampening electricity output from solar farms and interfering with manufacturing facilities, among others. But the effects of dust storms on the health of El Pasoans may be even worse.
Estrella Herrera is a scientist at the University of California, Merced, who studies the effects of dust on human health in the San Joaquin Valley in California and West Texas.
Herrera, who grew up in Ciudad Juárez and received her doctorate from UTEP, conducted a study of dust events in El Paso recorded from 2010 through 2014. She made a stark discovery: The number of hospitalizations here was five times higher after a dust storm hit the city than before. She also found a similar trend – although less pronounced – in both Lubbock and Amarillo.
A chart Herrera created shows a large increase in the number of people hospitalized in El Paso on the day of major dust storm events from 2010 through 2014. Hospitalization rates stayed elevated in the days following dust storms. (Courtesy Estrella Herrera)
“The day before the dust event, the hospitalization rate is very low. And then the day of the dust event, it increases about 400%,” Herrera said in an interview. “The dust events really affect the hospitalizations. It affects the health of the residents of El Paso on the day of the dust event, and also the following seven days.”
Breathing in high levels of particulate matter floating in the air – like dust as well as sand, which is generally made up of larger particles than dust – can lead to inflammation of different parts of the body and exacerbate a wide range of health problems a person may already have, Herrera said.
Exposure to small particulates can make respiratory conditions such as asthma worse. But the effects go beyond just respiratory problems. For example, breathing in particles during a dust storm can agitate Alzheimer’s patients, cause women to menstruate excessively and also enter a person’s lungs and then bloodstream and cause other problems, Herrera said.
She said the dust itself is made up of many different things. For one, strong winds can kick up dirt from places like the former ASARCO industrial site along Interstate 10, where the soil contains arsenic and lead that can enter the air.
Floating dust and sand can also contain bacteria, as well as fungal spores that cause illnesses such as Valley fever. And dust here commonly contains crystalline silica, which is toxic to humans, she said.
“It is not only the bacteria or the fungi that can be in the air, but also the toxicity of the” particulate matter, Herrera said.
Still, local elected officials aren’t powerless to mitigate dust storms. And individual El Pasoans can take steps to protect their health during the dusty season.
Most of the dust and sand that blanket the city during wind storms comes from outside of El Paso, but not all of it.
Gill said a big Ice Age-era dry lake bed southwest of Ciudad Juárez is a major source of dust that enters El Paso, and so are dry river beds and desert plains as far as 100 miles away in New Mexico west of El Paso.
“But a substantial amount of the dust also clearly comes from within the metro area itself,” Gill said, citing construction sites, dirt roads and open land as some of the sources of dust within the city.
In another recent study Gill participated in, researchers measured deposits of dust that collected over several years. They found twice as much dust in deposits within the city compared with deposits in rural parts of El Paso County – suggesting urban sources are also a big contributor to the dust storms.
However, there isn’t consensus among policymakers in El Paso on what exactly to do about local sources of dust.
Before retiring recently, Carlos Rincon served as the Border Office director in El Paso for the EPA, and he spent over four decades developing cross-border collaboration between the U.S. and Mexico on environmental issues.
He’s tried to make the case that a collaborative effort to have local governments pave roads throughout El Paso County but also in Juárez would help lower dust pollution for everyone in the borderland.
Around 40% of roads in Juárez remain unpaved, Herrera said, especially in the low-income western and northwestern segments of that city.
In her research, Herrera has also recommended that policymakers pave roads on both sides of the border to limit dust and sand pollution.
A map of Ciudad Juarez shows unpaved roads highlighted in blue. Air quality experts say paving roads in Juarez and throughout El Paso County would help limit blowing dust in the region. (Courtesy Estrella Herrera)
“It’s important to pave roads,” Rincon told El Paso Matters in an interview last year. “Everybody will benefit. There will be less hospitalizations, there will be less going to the ERs, et cetera, if there’s no particles in the air if we increase and hopefully get to 100% of all streets paved. So, that’s the opportunity.”
Not everyone agrees.
The city of El Paso’s Office of Climate and Sustainability is in charge of crafting a climate action plan for the region – which, among other goals, aims to address extreme heat here and improve El Paso’s air quality.
Despite the potential to help limit blowing dust, officials like Fernando Berjano, the city’s senior climate program manager, have said they don’t like the idea of laying down asphalt on dirt roads. That’s because they say that would run up against efforts to make El Paso less hot. The urban heat island effect happens in asphalt and concrete-laden areas of cities that are typically warmer than less-developed areas with vegetation.
There are other options. Herrera said the city should rehabilitate unused, empty land by planting desert groundcover and other vegetation, which she said would limit dust as well as restore the ecosystem by attracting native animals and plants.
She also said a better forecast and warning system about incoming dust storms could help caregivers ensure vulnerable residents are indoors or wearing a mask ahead of a dust storm. And it would also help schools decide whether to keep students indoors instead of letting them outside for recess during blowing sand storms.
Residents can also plant a tree or two that require minimal water but provide shade and act as a barrier to the wind and dust from entering a home, Herrera said. Insulating spots such as windows or doors can help prevent a home’s interior from getting coated with dust, too.
Local officials are starting to think about the toll that stronger and more frequent dust storms could take on El Paso’s economic growth.
“What do we say when we have (business executives) come in? Like Amazon, Facebook. We tell them ‘We don’t have tornadoes, we don’t have earthquakes. You don’t worry about hurricanes.’ And we always sell that,” El Paso County Judge Ricardo Samaniego told El Paso Matters. He acknowledged the small tremor here last weekend caused by oil and gas extraction in the Permian Basin.
“But, now, the sandstorms have become something similar to having a problem with the climate that we didn’t have to worry about before,” he said.
“I don’t know how temporary it is,” Samaniego said of the historically dusty spring this year. “But it could be something permanent due to climate change, drought.”
A delegation of Taiwanese executives recently visited El Paso to explore establishing a server manufacturing facility here, Samaniego said. On both visits, the city experienced a sand storm.
“They said ‘Wow, do you guys always have these sandstorms?’” Samaniego said. “Servers are very, very delicate to any dust of any kind, and so you try to block it, but people bring dust in. If there’s more dust, it’s not that easy to control completely.”
To outsiders wanting to do business in El Paso, the dust storms add another worrisome issue to consider on top of the Trump administration’s tariff policies and militarized immigration enforcement, Samaniego said.
“When you see all of these things, and then you hear all of these dust storms are taking place, it sort of adds into this one more thing that we have to worry about,” he said.
Samaniego said he wants to tap UTEP and other local universities to study the mult-faceted issue of intensifying dust storms and the related health effects.
“It behooves us right now to really sit down with the university and say, ‘Hey, look, we have this issue. Could you attack it from all the different elements?” Samaniego said.
Maybe one answer for companies worried about the dust affecting their operation, he said, could be to design buildings with more intense blowing dust storms in mind.
A view of Downton after the National Weather Service El Paso on Thursday, March 6, 2025, issued a triple-threat warning of strong winds, blowing dust and critical fire conditions. (Bill Pitchkolan / El Paso Matters)
“People start saying, ‘Oh, no, this is seasonal, temporary,’” Samaniego said. “Well, if it happens again, are you going to just go right back to square one, or do you say, ‘Maybe we need to build things differently?’”
There are a lot of questions remaining about the dust storms here that researchers such as Herrera want to tackle. Are men or women more likely to suffer negative impacts from blowing sand and dust storms, and why? And is this dust season an outlier, or the sign of what’s to come in future years?
Gill said he wasn’t sure whether climate change is directly responsible for the historically dusty bout El Paso has experienced over the last few months. But he said the warmer average temperatures the region is experiencing “make the effects of drought on the land even worse.”
“The last few years have had a continuing drought, which has been a major contributor to making land prone to releasing dust in the wind,” Gill said.
Whether the kind of dust El Paso has experienced this year returns with the winds next spring is an open question – and one that could determine how attractive El Paso is for businesses looking to invest and for people looking to move to or stay in El Paso.
“It’s hard to think that this trend would continue,” Gill said. “But I don’t rule anything out anymore.”
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[1] Url:
https://elpasomatters.org/2025/05/11/el-paso-weather-dust-storms-wind-climate-change-impact/
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