Stories of Victims of Smoke

The crackle of a wood-burning fireplace may be a warming winter delight for those who have one.

But opposition from neighbours who don't want to breathe the smoke is spurring a new look at the issue.

Metro Vancouver officials say new research shows wood smoke is a significant source of particulate, even in urban areas like Metro Vancouver.

And they're beginning to now considering whether more action is needed to protect local health.

"While overall levels of wood smoke pollution may be higher in rural areas, urban wood smoke may have a larger population-level health impact because of the greater number of people exposed," says a Metro Vancouver report.

An estimated 128,500 homes in Metro Vancouver have wood-burning stoves or fireplaces.

The regional district estimates residential wood smoke contributes about 10 per cent of total fine particulate matter in the air.

Last winter saw some days of poor air quality in Langley and Chilliwack when fine particulate levels exceeded the region's daily target limit, according to the staff report.

There's no proof household wood burning was directly responsible, it adds, but says it was a contributing factor.

There were also "numerous occasions" throughout the lower Fraser Valley when particulate spiked during cold evenings, but the readings, when averaged out over 24 hours, were not high enough to exceed the daily maximums.

Despite tougher provincial requirements for the sale of new fireplaces and stoves, many older models still exist.

Metro fields plenty of complaints about household burning.

But air quality district director Ray Robb said enforcement is tricky – authorities can only inspect the premises with the owner's permission and it's tough to prove a particular home's chimney is the source of local pollution without setting up expensive monitoring equipment.

"It's one of those divisive issues," Robb said, adding the regional district is caught between those asserting their right to breathe and their right to burn.

Leading the call for a crackdown is Vancouver resident Vicki Morell, who has launched an online petition urging tougher bylaws in light of the health hazard wood smoke poses.

"This is the new second-hand smoke," she says. "People need to know how bad it is."

She cites U.S. Environmental Protection Agency estimates that wood smoke poses a 12 times greater lifetime cancer risk than exposure to the same volume of tobacco smoke.

Fine particulate can penetrate deep into the lungs . Effects can range from coughing and irritated eyes to asthma, bronchitis and reduced lung function.

Morell has battled one neighbour who burns wood in a fireplace and a second who burns even during summer months using a chiminea on his deck.

"We can't open a window let alone a door without being invaded by the foul stench of smoke," Morell said.

Authorities are powerless to intervene, she said, and the local offenders continue to belch, spewing verbal abuse at anyone who objects.

Morell believes the use of wood heat by those who have fireplaces will climb this winter in response to higher heating fuel prices unless action is taken.

Robb said Metro Vancouver is exploring three main options:

• Public education on proper fuels and operation;

• Offering incentives to persuade owners to replace existing fireplaces and stoves with new, cleaner burning models;

• Tougher regulations.

Robb said enforcement could pose a challenge even if recommendations coming back from a consultant suggest tightened bylaws are in order. That study is to be complete by the end of this year.

Metro has applied to join a provincial wood stove exchange program that would subsidize the installation of fireplace inserts here that promise to cut fine particulate emissions by 70 per cent.

Current Metro Vancouver bylaws bar fireplace users from burning anything other than wood, paper or natural gas, and that burning be in line with "recommended operating procedures and in a manner which minimizes emissions."

We would like to draw your attention to the serious health issue of wood burning in unregulated stoves and fireplaces in residential areas.

50% of winter smog is caused by wood burning. Wood burning produces toxic by-products such as dioxin, carbon monoxide, furans and small particulates which   damage delicate lung tissue; some components of WS are carcinogenic.  WS contributes to asthma in children, lung and cardiovascular disease, and cancer in adults, particularly seniors.  Tax-subsidized EPA stoves are only slightly less polluting and probably will lead to more burning.

Our family cannot escape these dangers as WS from neighbouring chimneys enters our home constantly even when our windows are closed. As a result we suffer from damaged / irritated eyes, heart pain, severe headaches, daily fatigue and breathing difficulties from lack of fresh air as oxygen feeds wood fires. 

What does Beaconsfield* propose to alleviate the dangers and nuisance of wood burning in the city by a minority** of burners?  A written response would be most welcome.

       Thank you for your attention to this vital issue,  Joan, Nathalie and Henri Doiron   

* Beaconsfield could alleviate the dangers and nuisance of wood burning in the city through using By-law 418.

**Only 10% of residents burn wood regularly.  The majority are being polluted by this small minority which remains unregulated. Recent surveys showed that 86% wish an end to toxic wood burning.

Boulder's Dirty Little Secret     Up in Wood Smoke     By KAREN KORENOSKI and MICHAEL YATES

Residents of Boulder, Colorado take pride in the city’s liveability. The town has won “more accolades than any other city in America for its recreation, culture, health, business climate, and overall quality of life.” It has been voted “Number One Best Place to Live” and “Best Overall Place to Live”; it is among “The Best Small Cities” and the “Top Ten Places to Retire”; it is “Number Four Heart Healthiest City”; it is in the “Top Ten of World’s Greener Cities”; it is a city that is “Making a Difference in the Environment”; and it is in the “Top 20 Greenest Spots in the Country.” We have lived in Boulder for eight months, and we can attest that it is beautiful. Unfortunately, the city’s “accolades” neglect a dirty little secret.

We moved to Boulder from Tucson, Arizona after one of us underwent major surgery, radiation, and chemotherapy. We have always been concerned about the environment, but such a serious illness made us more so. Tucson was just too polluted, congested, hot, and stressful to stay. So we looked for a place that was the “anti-Tucson.” Boulder seemed to fill the bill. We could decompress from months of trauma and begin to rebuild our lives.

We rented a downtown apartment in February, on the top floor of an office building.
It was removed enough from the main street to be quiet, a bonus in a college town. From our bedroom window we could see Mt. Sanitas; from our balcony we could admire the spectacular western sky over the eastern plains. If we turned right from the building’s front doors, we could walk to steep and challenging hiking trails that led up into the foothills of the Rocky Mountains; if we turned left, we could enjoy the shops, bookstores, restaurants, and street musicians of the traffic-free Pearl Street Mall. It looked like we had found the perfect place to heal.

The first sign that something was amiss happened a few days after we signed our lease. We noticed a plume of black smoke coming from a chimney on a roof directly below our patio. It turned out that we were next door to a restaurant that used a wood-burning oven, something that the landlord failed to tell us. A few months later, a second wood-burning restaurant opened, with its chimneys on an adjacent roof.

Our dream apartment turned into a nightmare. Every day, beginning in early morning, smoke from the ovens rises in steady plumes above the chimneys. This goes on, with the occasional break, for nearly twelve hours, seven days a week. The smell is so obnoxious that we cannot open windows or use our balcony, and it is so strong that it often permeates our living quarters. Our noses are runny; our throats are sore and scratchy; and we have a hard time breathing.

The two restaurants we have come to despise are named The Kitchen and Salt. Like many businesses in Boulder and quite a few other restaurants, these eateries claim to reflect Boulder’s refined environmental consciousness. The Kitchen says on its website: “The Kitchen believes in protecting our environment. Wind power provides 100 percent of the restaurant's electricity and we recycle or reuse nearly 100 percent of our discards. All of our paper products and straws are biodegradable. We give the remaining uncooked food and open bottles of wine to our staff at the end of each shift and all of our food discards are composted and often find their way back to the farms they came from.” This eatery has garnered many awards and citations for its commitment to the environment: “West’s Greenest Restaurant” (Sunset magazine, 2008) and Number 6 in “Top 10 Best Eco-friendly Restaurants” (Bon Appetit, 2008). It prominently displays a PACE decal in its window (Boulder County’s Partners for a Clean Environment).

Salt has joined the environmental bandwagon. One reviewer gushed about Salt’s love for Mother Earth: “. . . Salt will walk the sustainability talk,” he says, “. . . [doing] all the little things The Kitch[en] does so well.” Salt’s chef described himself to another reviewer as “Johnny Local,” referring to his use of local organic farm produce. “We’re doing fun, affordable, simple, seasonal food and supporting those who do right by Mother Nature. . . . We’re taking our food away from corporate greed and making good choices by buying as much as we can on a local level.” (This is amusing given that, as one blogger put it, “word on the street is that Salt’s . . .well-established Boulder area chef, and his team of investors, put in a million dollars in their renovation . . . .”---none of this in search of profit, we are to suppose).

While restaurant wood smoke has damaged our quality of life, it is doing much more than this. It is, in fact, a definite and well-established danger to the public’s health. A few examples will suffice. First, wood smoke contains numerous toxic substances, many of which are also found in tobacco smoke. A few of these are chlorinated dioxin, carbon monoxide, methane, volatile organic compounds, nitrogen oxides, and fine particulate matter. Second, some wood smoke components are known carcinogens, including benzene, formaldehyde, and toluene. A Google search of “wood smoke and cancer” yields thousands of entries. Third, wood smoke is definitely correlated with many other diseases and health problems, such as asthma, allergies, Chronic Obstructive Pulmonary Disease (COPD), high blood pressure, strokes, and heart attacks, just to name a few. Children, the elderly, and people with existing lung and other diseases are especially susceptible to the harm done by wood smoke. Wood smoke “should be actively avoided” by such persons, according to the American Lung Association. Fourth, exposure to wood smoke can weaken the immune system, making us more susceptible to disease and weakening our ability to recover from both diseases and treatments such as cancer therapies.

Irony and hypocrisy abound here. These restaurants do not allow smoking. Yet, wood smoke is more dangerous to health than cigarette smoke; it penetrates deeply into the lungs and takes more time to dissipate in the air. It is chemically active in the body forty times longer than tobacco smoke. One study showed that a restaurant that burned wood but was non-smoking was similar in terms of pollution to a restaurant without wood-burning equipment but which allowed smoking. The chefs claim to be concerned with the environment; one local reviewer has called businesspersons like them “greenpreneurs.” Yet, their kitchen equipment spews dangerous particulate matter into the air hour after hour, year-round (and we won’t even go into how the health of the kitchen workers and patrons is affected by the wood-burning ovens, grills, and rotisseries, or the sources of all those truckloads of wood). The owner of the building that houses one of the restaurants is a rich and generous philanthropist who donated millions of dollars for the building of a first-class cancer center in Boulder. How is it that he can condone the releasing of carcinogenic smoke into the town’s atmosphere? We spoke with him, and he seemed oblivious to the problem.

We know that, other things equal, wood smoke raises the mortality rate. As researcher Peter Montague tells us, "To summarize bluntly, any increase in fine particles in the atmosphere kills someone. The victims remain nameless, but they have been deprived of life all the same." Tens of thousands of people in the United States die every year from particulate pollution, to which wood smoke is an important contributor. Worldwide, the World Heath Organization estimates that there are nearly three million premature deaths worldwide from exposure to wood smoke.

We have complained to public officials in Boulder, and while some have not even bothered to return our calls (one is the city’s Environmental Affairs Manager), others have done what they could. One agency asked The Kitchen to clean its word-burning equipment so that the emitted smoke met the city’s opacity requirement. However, in the absence of a prohibition of the use of wood-burning devices, something that England enacted in 1956, Boulder cannot prevent their use, which means that heath-debilitating smoke will continue to permeate the city’s air. Besides The Kitchen and Salt, there are at least half a dozen more restaurants that use wood-burning equipment, all in an area about one mile square. We have begun to publicize the dangers as best we can and will continue to do so, in the hope that sooner or later citizen complaints will generate official action.

Peasants in poor countries cut down trees for wood fires to heat their homes and cook their food. This does tremendous damage to the environment. The peasants suffer disproportionately from the smoke-induced health problems described above; there is even a name for one infection common among them--“hut lung”). The deforestation that provides the wood makes their surroundings more susceptible to floods, mudslides, and drought. However, those who cut down the trees and burn the wood are desperately poor and have no real choice in the matter. Our restaurateurs, on the other hand, do have perfectly viable and probably cheaper choices. They do not have to use wood-burning appliances. We cannot think of a single justification for them. We doubt that many patrons could tell the wood-smoked food from any other. And even supposing that food cooked with a wood fire tasted marginally better, so what? The taste differential cannot possibly justify using wood when there are such obvious health hazards. What excuse is there for Boulder or any other city to continue to allow restaurants to employ this dirty, dangerous, and unnecessary cooking practice?