Burning Issues Today

Fallacy No. 2 - Wood Smoke Dissipates Rapidly

It is often stated and thought that wood smoke pollution drops off rapidly with distance from the source.  Proponents of wood burning will often say that if you are a few hundred feet away from a fire there is no problem. It is as though they think that wood smoke dispersion follows some kind of a square law like electric fields; double the distance and the effect is reduced by a factor of four.  Other people reason that smoke is hot and hot air rises so smoke will just float up and away.

Unfortunately, smoke does not behave that way.  The reasons being that smoke is that smoke is airborne and heavier than air.  The dispersion of wood smoke is at the mercy of air conditions.  The important factors include wind direction, inversion layers, and temperature.

Lets look at a few examples.  Smoke doesn’t just rise and disappear. The temperature of the smoke particles cool and then they are no longer buoyed upward and so they drift downward.  In fact, the particles can puddle in low valleys.  There is a study in the State of Washington that showed that children living in valleys enjoyed less lung function than children living on mountain ridges.  Moral of the story: you don’t want to live below a wood burner.

Temperature inversions which often occur on clear, cold, calm nights can trap airborne pollutants relatively close to the ground. Inversion layers are a real problem in the San Francisco Bay area because inversion layers are frequent and often below eighty feet and can trap most pollutants between the mountains and the Bay.

Wind is the big culprit.  If you are up wind from a burner, you have no problem. If you are downwind, you will obviously get all his smoke. If there is no wind, the smoke will puddle in his imediate neighborhood.  We have all seen that the case where smoke will lazily emerge from a chimney, drift horizontally a short distance, and settle obnoxiously in a neighbors yard.

A few days ago, when traveling through the Sea Ranch along the Sonoma coast in California, we passed a burning trash pile.  The smoke was a visible haze at road level for at least two miles thanks to a light North wind. Once, I flew over forest file in Arizona and one could clearly see a narrow plum of smoke that extended a hundred miles or more.  Studies have shown that fine particulates can stay airborne for three weeks and cover 700 miles unless washed out by rain.

So anyone who says that just being a few hundred feet from a neighbor solves the problem is just blowing smoke.

Fallacy No. 1 - Wood Smoke in Rural areas is not a Problem

From time to time, I would like to discuss some of the fallacious arguments used by the supporters of residential wood burning. The first fallacy discussed - Wood smoke in rural areas is not a problem is used frequently. In reality it can be a huge problem for the following reasons. They are not necessarily given in the order of importance.

Rural areas are often forested and people often own larger parcels of land in rural areas than urban or suburban areas. Thus there is a lot of wood available for burning and many people not only burn wood for heat, but many, many people have burn piles from clearing and maintaining their property. It almost seems like pyromania. Thus, there can be really a lot of burning in rural areas. There is so much smoke around that people begin to start saying “That’s the way we do things around here.” and they become accepting of the wood smoke. And this burning is reflected in elevated health problem seen in rural areas. For instance, Mendocino County, CA does not meet the the health based California Airborne Particulate Matter Standards. The Mendocino AIr Quality Management District cites wood smoke and unpaved roads as major sources. It is not the case that because fewer people live here that the air is clean. Just because there are fewer people in rural area it is not right to expose them to high risks.

Often, the people who are subjected to the greatest risk from residential wood burning are the people living in the house that is wood heated. Children, the elderly, and the ill that live in those houses should not be exposed. Such burners are violating their family responsibilities as much as burners living in any other area.

The per capita income in rural areas is lower than elsewhere and often the housing stock is older and more dilapidated. Such housing requires more heat to make it comfortable and that aggravates the problem. Rather than trying to save money by burning wood, the residents would be better off installing insulation and double pane windows.

Medical services often lag in rural areas. So if one develops a medical problem caused by or aggravated by wood smoke, getting medical care in a rural area can be more of a problem and more expensive.

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