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Pastimes : Where the GIT's are going -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: John Carragher who wrote (177029)	4/5/2009 1:13:09 AM
From: ManyMoose	2 Recommendations Respond to of 225578

Our rules do not allow burning yard debris nor burn barrels. This policy is about a year old and withstood a challenge. It results from the state reclassifying our area as an Urban Growth Area. UGAs as they call them have strict rules for burning and air quality set by the EPA, I think. Our area is the largest community in the county, bigger even than the county seat, yet is unincorporated. It is more like a forest in many parts than any kind of urban area, growth or otherwise. That's the part where we have a problem. Pine forests like ours produce the energy equivalent of 300 gallons of gasoline per acre per year, and if you don't dispose of it somehow it builds up. When you get a wildfire, it all goes at once, likely burning up homes and other structures. The policy is stupid, and the smoke I smell right now is somebody's defiance of it. Defiance is possible because there's no money for enforcement. Instead of people west of the Cascades where it rains all the time who have no concept of conditions around here passing a stupid law, they should have let locals come up with a policy that trains people to burn debris with very little smoke. It's possible, and that's the way I did it before it was banned. Also, they could have two or three burning days a month so people can deal with their pine needles, cones, and branches. The alternative they came up with was a chipper day, which required everybody to haul their debris to a big pile where convicts ran it through a chipper, whereupon it was shipped to Montana for use as hog fuel. Recreational fires are permitted and I have a safe fire pit surrounded by twenty feet of gravel. I burn my cones while cooking hotdogs or hamburgers. I throw them in one handful at a time in order to prevent the kind of smoke that most people get. I have my tools, buckets of water, and a charged hose for safety and I put the fire out before dark. And of course it snowed a day or so after I cooked my hamburgers. Our no-burn policy is an example of what happens when people pass laws to regulate issues they know nothing about. Our local state representative took our objections to the legislature and was met with blank stares. We are in for a lot more of this kind of thing nationally, I'm afraid. We have an entire administration regulating things they know nothing about.