An organization called Citizens Against Polluted Air (CAPA) has created a web site called PrescribedBurns.com.
The stated purpose of the site is to convince the public that prescribed fires are “deadly” and “the smoke could be killing your children and grandparents”. It says the “smoke emitted from prescribed burns and manged wildfire is unfiltered wood smoke“.
CAPA also has another web site called Bad-Air Arizona, which is based at a free hosting company. It has some of the same text as the other site, such as stating that “prescribed burn and managed burn smoke is unfiltered wood smoke“. They always underline the “unfiltered wood smoke” as if to emphasize that land mangers are negligent by not installing smoke filters on their wildfires and prescribed fires.
Both web sites claim that wood smoke “kills at least 40,000 adults and children every year”. The site does not provide any documentation for this statistic.
The PrescribedBurns.com internet domain was first registered by the Prescott, Arizona-based group on July 8, 2009. DomainTools.com claims CAPA owns about 100 other internet domains, and that PrescribedBurns.com is for sale. Phone calls and emails to the owner of the web site were not immediately returned.
The web site states that “we” are in the early stages of obtaining legal counsel and preparing litigation against officials of the U. S. Forest Service and the Department of Environmental Quality.
The web site has a solution to prescribed fires:
There is a better way. Unlike fires that kill trees, animals, and people, mechanical methods such as tree thinning and mulching machines remove only unwanted trees and brush grinding them into healthy mulch leaving the forest clean and healthy instead of burned and charred. Mechanical methods are cleaner, safer and properly maintain forest health while protecting the environment from air pollution, but officials argue that prescribed burns are easier, cheaper and increase their budget faster than other methods.
There is no question that wildfires and prescribed fires produce a lot of smoke, and the smoke contains a lot of particulates and chemicals that can be harmful to humans. Wildfire Today has documented that previously (also, HERE). And, some people with respiratory problems can be extremely sensitive to smoke.
But I don’t think it will ever be economically or environmentally feasible to treat all of our forests, grasslands, and brushlands with mechanical methods while banning prescribed fires.
The vegetation will burn eventually, either by management ignited prescribed fires, or by unplanned ignitions. Both produce smoke, but at least with a prescribed fire, the managers have some control over the vegetation conditions, weather, timing, wind direction, and the mixing height.
Postponing the inevitable is not the answer.
Thanks Dick
Anyone with any sense knows that the brush burned out by prescribed burns just grows back in a short time leaving the area with a worse fire hazard than before. It would be impossible to burn enough to control wildfires.
The only thing prescribe fire does is make people sick. Don’t believe me?? Take a blood pressure monitor with you & check your blood pressure while in the smoky area. I’ll bet it will be over 200.
NonSense – I respectfully disagree with your statement about brush that is burned growuing back to become “a worse fire hazard than before”. My obsevations are that old, decadent brush with a dead component burns more readily than young, green growing brush; younger brush is generally lower in height as well, so that flame lenghts are shorter; and there is less total volume of burnable material for many years, also reducing the intensity of the fire.
You make comments about smoke making people sick, and relate that to blood pressure levels: my old EMT training indicated that a high blood pressure predisposes you to heart attacks and possible strokes, not “illness” or “sickness”: do you have any facts/studies to back up any of your statements? If my blood pressure drops after leaving the perscribed burn area, is the problem resolved?
As a wildland fire manager, I have been on hundreds of prescribed fires across the US, am now in my 60s, still go on wildfires, and am still healthy and a strong supporter of the wise use of prescribed fire. Show me real facts and I may change my mind…..!
Most mountain communities have worse particulate matter in the winter from wood-burning stoves than any prescribed fire will ever cause. The little kiddies breath that, too, but I don’t see any deceptive websites with crying babies denouncing the use of woodburning stoves. By the way, there are other ecosystems besides brush in the American West. Maybe you’ve heard of them – forests, grasslands.. No? Well, they need fire to be healthy, too, but I’m all for stopping all natural fires of any kind – it just makes for more explosive conditions that can’t be controlled on down the line. It’s typical short-sighted human thinking, but it puts money in my pocket when the fires finally do burst forth. Thanks for playing.
Smoke is bad for us, no question about it but considering that wild fires have been around a long, long, time and are a part of the natural order of things, we are better off living with that small amount of smoke exposure. Volcanos can also produce smoke. Mt. St. Helens produced huge amounts of smoke when it blew. I would love to see a anti-smoke group attempt to put a giant filter on a primed to blow volcano. Besides the ash spread around helps soil fertility to some degree.
In the last 100 years humans have produced a lot more smoke then wild or prescribed fires ever have or will in the form of coal, oil and wood burning industry, heating, transportation, agriculture, wars amd atomic bombs. That’s the kind of smoke I worry about. There is where our efforts to clean up the atmosphere need to be aimed. Just look down wind of the Sudbury nickel refinery in Canada. Everything was just plain dead in 1974 when I passed through. That was some nasty smoke.Brought back visions of agent orange in Vietnam.
During the first Gulf War Sadam and friends created huge amounts of toxic smoke from burning oil wells they lit off for fun and revenge.
I share the smoke concerns for kids but without forests there is not much of a future for them.
Maybe you should learn about the smoke effects on health before laughing about our children’s reaction to the smoke. As a concerned parent, I agree with the prescribedburns.com website 100 per cent. Public health takes precedent over forest health!!!
Yeah. That should work out, especially when the forests are gone and there’s nothing but more people on a hot, dying planet. In case you didn’t get the memo – humans require other species for their survival.
Maybe we can get the cigarette companies to come up with a giant filter to mount on the tops of burning trees- viola! filtered smoke!