Wood Smoke Dissipates Rapidly----A Fallacy!

Here's a great article posted on Clean Air Revival:

Posted: January 15th, 2007- http://burningissues.org/blog/

Wood Smoke Dissipates Rapidly

It is often stated and thought that wood smoke pollution drops off rapidly with distance from the source. Proponents of wood burning will often say that if you are a few hundred feet away from a fire there is no problem. It is as though they think that wood smoke dispersion follows some kind of a square law like electric fields; double the distance and the effect is reduced by a factor of four. Other people reason that smoke is hot and hot air rises so smoke will just float up and away.
Unfortunately, smoke does not behave that way. The reasons being that smoke is that smoke is airborne and heavier than air. The dispersion of wood smoke is at the mercy of air conditions. The important factors include wind direction, inversion layers, and temperature.

Lets look at a few examples. Smoke doesn’t just rise and disappear. The temperature of the smoke particles cool and then they are no longer buoyed upward and so they drift downward. In fact, the particles can puddle in low valleys. There is a study in the State of Washington that showed that children living in valleys enjoyed less lung function than children living on mountain ridges. Moral of the story: you don’t want to live below a wood burner.

Temperature inversions which often occur on clear, cold, calm nights can trap airborne pollutants relatively close to the ground. Inversion layers are a real problem in the San Francisco Bay area because inversion layers are frequent and often below eighty feet and can trap most pollutants between the mountains and the Bay.
Wind is the big culprit. If you are up wind from a burner, you have no problem. If you are downwind, you will obviously get all his smoke. If there is no wind, the smoke will puddle in his imediate neighborhood. We have all seen that the case where smoke will lazily emerge from a chimney, drift horizontally a short distance, and settle obnoxiously in a neighbors yard.

A few days ago, when traveling through the Sea Ranch along the Sonoma coast in California, we passed a burning trash pile. The smoke was a visible haze at road level for at least two miles thanks to a light North wind. Once, I flew over forest file in Arizona and one could clearly see a narrow plum of smoke that extended a hundred miles or more. Studies have shown that fine particulates can stay airborne for three weeks and cover 700 miles unless washed out by rain. So anyone who says that just being a few hundred feet from a neighbor solves the problem is just blowing smoke.

Clean Air Revival---Burning Issues--web site

Great web site for information......
http://burningissues.org/car-www/index.html


The Importance of Clean Air
Clean Air Revival provides public education about the medical hazards of exposure to wood smoke and other fine particulate pollution. Smoke from residential burning of wood and coal, wood burning restaurants and outdoor burning of wood, leaves, crops, tires and debris is permeating our neighborhoods, resulting in high ground level concentrations of toxic air pollution.


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Burning Issues is a project of Clean Air Revival, Inc., a 501C-3 non profit educational organization. Clean Air Revival, Inc. is registered with the Registry of Charitable Trusts in the State of California. Our organization number is #1686895.
Burning Issues depends on your donations and grants. 100% of funds further research, office operating expense and education. All labor and our building are donated. There are no paid employees. Please consider donating generously. Your donation helps spread life saving science. Our award winning website: http://burningissues.org is visited by 1,800 people daily from all over the world.
Burning Issues has an international membership and was founded by Mary J. Rozenberg, at the Loma Prieta Chapter of the Sierra Club Clean Air Committee in 1987. It is devoted to the improvement of ambient air quality through the reduction of Particulate Pollution, i. e., solid particulate matter less than 2.5 microns in diameter.

The most common sources of Particulate Pollution are residential wood burning (RWB) and coal burning, forest and agriculture burning, and diesel and auto exhaust. The extent of the severity of the fine particulate problem can be grasped in the estimate that 60,000 people die annually in the United States from the effects of these particles. Once emitted they are impossible to clean up. More than half of the fine particulate is caused by fewer than 10% of the population using the dirtiest fuels for recreation and heating.

The principal activity of Burning Issues is the collection and dissemination of the latest science information regarding health effects, economic impacts, and individual actions to reduce and stop solid fuel combustion. Burning Issues also actively does particulate monitoring and has published the results.
Mary Rozenberg, President, PO Box 1045, Point Arena, CA 95468, (707)882-3601, e-mail = Mary.Rozenberg@gmail.com
http://burningissues.org