810-Lmcnter Farming, Saturday, Novamfear 1,1986
DENVER On a clear winter
day in this mile-high city, you can
see beyond the downtown
skyscrapers to the low mountains
of the Front Range, beyond them
to the white caps of the 14,000-foot
peaks of the Rocky Mountains,
etched against the infinite azure of
the western sky.
But chances are good that you
won’t even be able to see the
foothills. They’ll be lost behind the
capital city’s infamous “brown
cloud,” the smog layer that hovers
200 to 300 feet off the ground when
weather conditions are right.
Causes Lung Diseases
It isn’t just ugly, it’s dangerous.
Colorado is the nation’s fourth
ranked state in deaths associated
with chronic obstructive
pulmonary diseases, according to
figures compiled by the federal
government. Such diseases include
emphysema, chronic asthma, and
chronic bronchitis.
Enter a new villain,
unrecognized until the past few
years: wood-burning stoves and
fireplaces.
Cars remain the chief con
tributor to polluted air in Denver
and most other cities. But it has
been determined that as much as
18 percent of the brown cloud over
the six-county Denver
metropolitan area of 1.5 million
people is caused by the residue
from fires in an estimated 72,000
stoves and fireplace inserts and in
265,000 fireplaces.
The percentage of pollution from
wood smoke is far greater in the
narrow valleys of ski-resort towns
in Colorado’s high Rockies
towns such as Aspen, Telluride,
Crested Butte, and Vail and in
New England winter resorts.
In Aspen, a town of 3,800 in a ski
area that may grow to 30,000 at the
height of the season, the 600-foot
thick cloud that engulfs the valley
is blue, not brown, because it is 45
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percent wood smoke, says Lee
Cassin, environmental health
officer for both Aspen and Pitkin
County.
Missoula, Mont., with a
population of 65,000, is another city
with a problem. When warm air
traps pollution-filled cold air in the
3,100-foot-high valley where
Missoula is located, “it f s a box
with a lid on it,” says Jim Carlson,
senior scientist with the city
county health department.
“It’s against human nature for
people to think they contribute
individually to a problem,” says
Steve Walker of the Albuquerque,
N.M., Environmental Health
Department’s Air Pollution
Control Division. A laboratory
study has found that the sources of
that state capital’s brown cloud
are divided equally between motor
vehicles and wood smoke.
“The thing I really worry
about,” Walker says, “is that when
you go through neighborhoods at
night, they’re being fumigated
with wood smoke. It reminds you
of the fog in ‘The 10 Com
mandments.’”
The health dangers from that
smoke are now well-known. Not
only does it contain carbon
monoxide and other noxious gases,
it also contains minuscule par
ticles, some of them as car
cinogenic as cigarette smoke, that
find their way into lungs. The
problem is felt most acutely in
population centers where altitude
is high and temperatures are low.
Ironically, use of wood stoves
took off during the oil crisis of the
19705, when wood was touted as an
environmentally sound,
economical, renewable source of
heat.
Although some authorities say
the craze probably crested in the
late ’7os, there are still an
estimated 12 million wood stoves in
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Looking forward to a rigorous winter, Vermont store owner Dan Fraser stockpiles
more than a hundred cords of firewood. In New England, as in the Rockies, Ozarks and
other heavily wooded regions, wood is a renewable and plentiful heat source. But it
comes with a price that goes beyond the per-cord cost. Wood smoke contains carbon
monoxide, other noxious gases, and minuscule particles that rival cigarette smoke for
virulence.
the United States, and 800,000 new
ones are sold every year.
Health dangers and soaring
wood costs notwithstanding,
people continue to enjoy their wood
fires. Robert Aukerman, a
professor at Colorado State
University, has conducted many
studies on wood uses. Sixty percent
of Coloradans burn wood for
recreation, not heat alone, he says.
Moreover, he calculates that
wood-burners are, in the long run,
stripping the state of fuel faster
than it can be replenished. “With
the amount of wood removed each
year in Colorado alone,” he says,
“we could build a wall two feet
wide and four feet tall from San
Francisco to New York and back
again.”
Governments at all levels are
taking action against the recently
recognized dangers of wood
caused pollution.
Resorts Adopt Restrictions
Aspen, Telluride, and other
resort communities have adopted
tough restrictions on the number of
stoves and fireplaces. Missoula
has mandatory no-bum days.
Denver followed suit this fall,
becoming the country’s largest
city to adopt a mandatory no-burn
policy.
Only two states, Oregon and
Colorado, have passed laws
requiring strict pollution-control
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standards for new wood stoves.
Oregon’s law took effect July 1;
Colorado’s will become effective
next Jan. 1.
After six months of negotiations
by representatives of government, (
industry, and environmental*
groups, on Jan 1 the U.S. En
vironmental Protection Agency
will announce nationwide cer
tification regulations for wood
stoves and fireplace inserts.
The new two-phase rules, to
begin on July 1, 1988, will reduce
wood-fire particulate emissions
more than 70 percent in the fifth
year and result in net savings to
the wood-buming public of $29
million a year, EPA officials
predict.