Homeowners, farmers, loggers and contractors from Clinton, Milan, Red Hook, Rhinebeck, Olive, Gardiner, Highland, Esopus and Greene County, among other locations, participated vigorously at a meeting at the Norrie Point Environmental Center in Staatsburg in late June. A restless regional audience denounced the state Department of Environmental Conservation’s proposed ban on almost all open burning. They cited the erosion of home rule, unfunded mandates, economic hardship, the sanctity of property rights and a set of laws that seem to have overshot their original intent.
The proposed regulatory changes seek to ban open burning except for campfires, the occasional legally sanctioned bonfire, and controlled situations requiring fully reviewed permits.
The DEC said the new laws are the result of shifts in the sorts of items people are burning, especially in rural areas, causing possible health dangers to the general population. The department also cited the increasing potential for wildfires being pushed by growing dry conditions tied to climate change. The new laws are an extension of a current ban on open burning statewide for any municipality with a population of 20,000 or more, a law in effect since 1972.
The current system of burn permits, overseen by local towns and villages, has been in place for over a century. It was devised as a means of keeping watch for potential forest fires from the fire-tower system then in place statewide. Any observed fire, it was figured, could be matched against lists of permitted burns for a day. Now, with that tower system obsolete, it was too hard keeping up with burns. So the solution was not to allow any, DEC officials decided.
“I have spoken to many contractors in the area, and no one knows about the changes. There will be substantial cost increases for homeowners and contractors alike,” predicted former Woodstock police chief Rich Ostrander of Boiceville in a recent e-mail. “I personally think this is a very important issue for a rural area, and it is going to hit like a ton of bricks.”
“We will be looking at public comments over the coming months,” DEC Region 3 director Willie Janeway said. “It is typical for us to revise proposals based on public reaction.”
But the DEC obviously doesn’t believe that things will remain the same. “The DEC believes that the private sector will solve the technical problems,” Janeway said. “They will in time produce outdoor boilers that pass clean-air standards. The old polluting units will age out over a predetermined time period. They will not be grandfathered forever.”
To some, those words are a prelude to a grim and unfamiliar future.
According to Ostrander, the Albany officials he spoke to about the new regulations in Albany told him, “You’re not going to be able to light a newspaper on fire in this state after this.”
Banning the burns
Once considered harmless, open burning, especially in burn barrels where generations of rural folk have burnt household garbage, has been found to release more dangerous chemicals into the air than previously thought. A recent study by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, undertaken in conjunction with DEC and the state health department, found that emissions of dioxins and furans from backyard burning alone were greater than all other sources combined for the years 2002-2004. The study also found that burning trash emits arsenic, carbon monoxide, benzene, styrene, formaldehyde, lead, hydrogen cyanide and other harmful chemicals. Trash containing plastics, polystyrene, pressure-treated and painted wood and bleached or colored papers can produce harmful chemicals when burned.
Open burning is also the largest single cause of wildfires in New York State, such as that which destroyed a large chunk of the Minnewaska area earlier this spring. Data from DEC shows that debris burning accounted for about two of five wildfires between 1986 and 2006, more than twice the next most-cited source.
Answering questions on behalf of the state at the meeting, DEC official Bob Stanton said the regulations, which had been written per a vague order by former governor Eliot Spitzer, would be open to changes once the current public hearing process, including receipt of written comments, was completed this month.
“The administration above said to ban all burning,” said Stanton, a regional air pollution control engineer. The issues, and the high proportion of regulatory opponents as compared to advocates, were similar around the state. Some places were more up in arms about protecting burn barrels and others with the burning of leaves. “Down in the Southern Tier folks were worried about identity theft,” Stanton said. “They said they needed the right to burn old papers.”
The Hudson Valley crowd seemed to agree that garbage burning was bad and brush burning with strict controls should be allowed.
“I would ask the appropriate NYSDEC personnel to use some common sense and stop all burning of trash either in barrels or otherwise,” suggested Ostrander in a follow-up letter, “and permit a homeowner to burn branches and brush on their own property with the proper permits, safety equipment, and notification of the appropriate authorities as it is done now.”
Burning one’s own brush
Former Clinton town supervisor and farmer Raymon Oberly asked what would happen to the state’s open-space initiative if spaces couldn’t be kept open because of the expenses necessitated by wood chippers and other means of timber removal. Agricultural exemptions didn’t make sense in terms of real farming, he felt. Much of his hardest work, he said, had to do with keeping the edges of fields back – which for him meant burning brush. If he was forced to use a wood chipper, where would the new piles of wood chips be kept or gotten rid of?
H. Sheldon Boice of Olive talked about how careful he and everyone he knew were when they did controlled burns. It was important to the cemetery association he headed to burn brush from the 57 pine trees under their care. Any added expense from renting or purchasing chippers, or having wood hauled away, would likely be too much for them.
Ostrander said that the cost of a chipper was averaging over $700 a day. “That’s a sizable expense,” he noted.
Contractor Terry Elmendorf, also of Olive, said that fire was the only way he could clear most of the steep lots he’d building on. What was he to do?
One tree farmer from Clinton, Paul Truss, spoke of fire being the only way to deal with diseased trees.
Others spoke of keeping their home lots clean and brush-free. Of working hard to live life as asked, recycling all they could and burning the rest. What had they done wrong?
Ulster County’s Resource Recovery Agency does accept brush, but it must be no more than four feet long, and have limbs no longer than four feet nor wider than six inches in diameter.
DEC sees small on-site burns being replaced over time by chippers and boilers at transfer facilities.
The proposed law is blunt about the future. “Due to the potential increase in the amount of household waste, brush, and land-clearing debris, communities may need to upgrade their transfer facilities. Upgrades would primarily consist of large trash compactors for household refuse, and wood chippers or tub grinders for brush and land-clearing debris,” the proposed law states. “Societal savings of health-related costs in affected rural areas should more than make up for the increased costs of solid waste disposal. A single hospitalization for asthma outside of New York City costs over $8,900 and the total cost for asthma hospitalizations amounted to over $284 million in 2002.”
The sole advocate for regulatory change at the Staatsburg meeting, Kathleen Wiacek, said that her Tillson neighbors used burn barrels indiscriminately, burning poison ivy to the point where they poisoned local kids with its smoke and even starting several wild fires by accident in the dark of night.
“I have three kids with respiratory ailments. The people here may burn responsibly, but what about those that don’t?” she said. “Why are our eyes burning? The quality-of -life issue here is bigger than the economic. Perhaps your lawns don’t have to look perfect. Let the wildflowers grow up for a change.”