Turning a Wasteland Into a Desert

Los Angeles County health inspector Chris Mastro is one of the few people on Earth who can find Sam Smith’s tumbledown trailer among the creosote and Joshua trees of the vast Mojave Desert, far from the nearest sign of civilization.

Smith, a 66-year-old retiree with skin as brown as a roasted coffee bean, runs his appliances off a jury-rigged wind generator and a few solar panels. And he tosses his garbage into a pile behind his tiny homestead.

Even though no one else may ever see it, the garbage is Mastro’s problem. For five years, his job has been to clean up the middle of nowhere.

He has directed the removal of 5,000-plus tons of illegally dumped trash from the Mojave in an effort to restore an environment that generations of Southern Californians have literally considered their wasteland.

“Sam,” Mastro barked cheerfully on a recent visit, the afternoon heat hovering well above 100 degrees, “What do you say I get you a few bags so you can clean up all that stuff back there?”

Mastro’s job was created as part of a broad effort to address illegal dumping in the High Desert, a problem that has grown worse in recent decades.

Historically, people from as far away as Orange County have avoided costly dumping fees by unloading everything from old tires to demolished homes in the desert. Before the establishment of legal landfills, desert dwellers like Smith discarded their garbage in improvised local dumps, some of which are still in use and now contain hundreds of tons of trash.

The population boom of the 1980s in the Antelope Valley brought more trash with it.

In the early 1990s, when the recession and the resulting foreclosures hit, fly-by-night companies came through communities like Lake Los Angeles to clean trash and old furnishings out of abandoned homes--only to illegally dump it nearby. A few years later, as those communities began to grow again, the desert was plagued with piles of construction waste.

Palmdale and Lancaster, which saw respective population gains of 69.5% and 22% in the 1990s, began to take notice of the huge heaps of junk and developed plans with the county to attack the problem. An effort also was made to change what local environmentalist Jane Williams calls the “desert rat” mind set, which holds that the Mojave is big enough to absorb such abuse.

The county created the Antelope Valley Illegal Dumping Task Force in 1996 to encourage residents to bring specific trash problems to health officials.

Today, Los Angeles County sheriff’s volunteers patrol known illegal dump sites, students are taught that desert dumping is wrong and the Antelope Valley annually celebrates an “Environmental Pride Week.”

Residents like Janet Byrum of Lancaster said the efforts have begun to pay off. “Though it’s not cleaner than it was in 1967, it’s definitely cleaner than it was in 1999,” she said.

Mastro’s efforts have made the biggest impact, task force Chairman Larry Levine says.

For Mastro, the job is primarily detective work. In his 700-square-mile coverage area that encompasses some of the most desolate terrain in the region, rumored dump sites are hard to pinpoint.

Mastro once discovered a decades-old site containing 1,800 tons of waste, only because he noticed a strange gleam near a remote butte as he was driving home. It turned out to be the sun shining on fields of broken glass.

Finding property owners also can be difficult. A few blocks from Byrum’s Lancaster home, Mastro has tried to clear a dump site spread over nine separately owned empty lots. Because it is private property, he can’t just clean the stuff up. First, he has to attempt to coerce the owners into doing it themselves.

A problem with these parcels--and a common one throughout the desert--is that few owners live nearby. One is in San Francisco, one is in Indiana, another is in Japan. “Sometimes, they don’t even know it’s theirs,” Mastro said.

If he doesn’t get a response to letters to the property owners, Mastro could go through the lengthy process of taking them to court. But, he said, it’s often better to declare the site a health hazard and send in a county prison crew to clean it up.

“And when I get this done, I can say, ‘I did it,’ ” said Mastro, 40. “Not a lot of people can say that.”

An environmental biologist, Mastro jumped at the offer to take the job five years ago. As a resident of a little town in the northern San Bernardino Mountains, he said he considers the desert his big backyard.

Because of the enormity of the problem, Mastro said he quickly learned to focus on the most dangerous, well-known and largest sites. Using more than $500,000 in state grants, four of the area’s largest illegal dumps have been cleared and three more will be when funding becomes available, he said. Other, smaller problems are often solved with the help of landlords, or with the occasional knock on the door of a suspected litterbug.

Many people he meets on the desert’s far-flung dirt roads tend to be fiercely independent types who oppose proposals to bring mandatory trash service to unincorporated areas, a move Mastro said would reduce illegal dumping. But he has also developed a respect for people like Smith, who have been able to function so far off the grid.

“People in these rural areas have their own wells, their own generators--they’re like the pioneers, almost,” he said. “They figure they can take care of their own trash too.”

Although it’s impossible to estimate how much garbage remains on the desert floor, Mastro thinks it’s declining, in part because the big dump sites he has cleaned up have stayed empty.

Last week, Mastro plowed his pickup truck across the desert to show off the site where he had seen the gleam of broken glass. In June 2000, a crew under his direction spent $150,000 to rid the area of asbestos, contaminated ash and other dangerous materials.

Today, it is indistinguishable from the miles of desert that stretch to the horizon.