COLUMN ONE : Stoking the Fires of Dissent : The tradition of burning wood for heat has cast a pall over many Sierra towns. Some neighbors complain of winter smog and health risks. Others say the inexpensive stoves are a matter of survival.

On cold winter days, the blue-gray haze that hangs over this mountain town is sometimes so thick you can taste it. It wafts up from the chimneys of residents who, in the best pioneer tradition, heat their homes with wood they cut themselves.

This is smog season in the Sierra Nevada, a time when the romantic ideal of a blazing hearth gives way to the reality of burning eyes, respiratory illness and even premature death from wood smoke pollution.

Wood fires--long a cheap source of heat--are increasingly under challenge in Northern California as government agencies begin to regulate when people can light fires and what kind of wood stoves they can use.

In this working-class hamlet 75 miles northwest of Lake Tahoe, the issue of smoke pollution has split the community, pitting residents who fear for their health against neighbors who insist on their God-given right to burn.

Banning barbecue lighter fluid in Los Angeles is one thing. But prohibiting wood fires in the mountains is another. “It would be like taking a person’s gun away,” said Quincy air pollution control specialist George Ozanich.

For some mountain inhabitants, wood stove heaters are a matter of survival. Many depend on wood as their sole source of warmth in regions where natural gas is unavailable, conversion to propane is costly and electric heating would be more expensive than the rent.

But for others, wood smoke is a source of discomfort and disease that can force them to stay indoors for days. “I don’t go out of my house unless I have to,” said Janet Glover, a 52-year-old Quincy native who blames her emphysema and asthma in part on a lifetime of breathing wood smoke. “If I open the door, it hits me. I feel like I’m imprisoned in my own home.”

Wood smoke pollution, largely a winter phenomenon in Western states, has plagued mountain dwellers for decades, mirroring the summer smog of Los Angeles.

In small mountain valleys on cold, calm days, smoke from wood fires is trapped by inversion layers that are sometimes just 50 to 100 feet above ground level. Without wind or stormy weather, the smoke can hang like a thick fog for days at a time between October and March.

In California, the problem is greatest in such mountain communities as Quincy, Mammoth Lakes and Truckee, which are nestled in valleys in the Sierra Nevada. But wood burning is also a major source of airborne particles in larger air basins such as the San Francisco Bay Area, the San Joaquin Valley, northern Sonoma County and the lower Salinas Valley. In downtown San Jose, as much as 40% of particle pollution on a winter day can come from wood smoke.

Scientists say they are only now beginning to understand the dangers of inhaling the tiny particles in wood smoke, which can become lodged deep in the lungs. Some say it is an underrated health threat that could be as dangerous as breathing secondhand tobacco smoke.

Recent studies show that children regularly exposed to wood smoke suffer diminished lung function. And some research suggests that even at levels deemed safe by the federal government, prolonged exposure to wood smoke particles can be fatal, especially for elderly people who already have respiratory problems.

No one can say for sure how many people die each year from breathing wood smoke. But some researchers are coming to the conclusion that particle pollution is more hazardous than ozone pollution, which is one of the major components of smog in Los Angeles. One study estimated that 60,000 people die annually from inhaling airborne particles that come from wood smoke and other sources, including road dust, diesel exhaust and emissions from manufacturing, mining and construction.

“The studies that have been done suggest to me that what we have is a very much underappreciated health hazard,” said Dr. Michael J. Lipsett, a public health physician with Cal-EPA.

Mary Rozenberg, a onetime concert cellist who suffers from lupus, lives in Los Altos, about 10 miles northwest of San Jose. She said she is forced to flee her home each winter for the cleaner air of the North Coast because wood smoke pollution in her neighborhood makes her so sick.

With $20,000 of her own money, she has formed an advocacy group called Burning Issues to fight the use of wood as fuel, which she believes should be outlawed everywhere in California.

“This stuff is really nasty and people are treating it as if it is not,” Rozenberg said. “The victims are elderly, they are not mobile, they don’t have enough money to move, and these dangerous levels of pollutants are entering their homes.”

But mountain dwellers are as attached to their wood stoves as Southland residents are to their cars. And few are able to afford the new generation of fancy stoves that come with catalytic converters as standard equipment.

In Quincy, going into the forest to collect firewood is a time-honored ritual, usually involving a pickup, a chain saw and a six-pack of beer. A permit to cut wood in the National Forest costs only $5, and some people store as much as two years’ worth of wood so they can weather any cold spell.

Around Quincy, winter temperatures can dip well below freezing. Virginia Bresciani, who moved here 70 years ago at the age of 3, has kept warm with wood all her life. She is a staunch defender of burning wood because it is the only economical way to heat the house in winter--and she thinks people who don’t like it should try breathing smog in Los Angeles 12 months a year.

She blames the smoke problem on people who don’t know how to burn properly--they use wood that is not dry enough and damp the fire down so low it does not get sufficient air.

“We’ve used wood stoves since I was a toddler and we never had a problem,” she said. “If the smoke bothers them this much, they shouldn’t live up here.”

A cattle rancher and insurance agent, she opposes any restrictions on burning, saying: “We’ve got too much government intervention right now. If you had to listen to the government every day you’d never get anything done.”

She dismissed those who worry about the health hazards of wood smoke, saying, “People look for something to holler about.”

Wood smoke opponents began focusing on the problem in the late 1980s, when pollution was heightened by the same climatic conditions that produced California’s six-year drought. But federal, state and local agencies have been slow to regulate the Stone Age technology of wood fires.

The federal Environmental Protection Agency requires that all new wood stove heaters meet specific emission standards, which can cut particle pollution by 90%. But the agency does not require replacement of the older stoves, which can keep on polluting for decades.

The EPA is also more than three years behind schedule in evaluating whether its safety threshold is adequate for airborne particles 10 microns or smaller--specks so small that more than 10,000 of them could fit on the dot over this i .

Last fall, the American Lung Assn. sued the EPA in a bid to force the agency to update its standard of 150 micrograms per cubic meter in a 24-hour period. “The evidence is growing that particulate pollution can kill,” said association President Alfred Munzer.

California, meanwhile, has set a safety standard for particle pollution three times as strict as the EPA threshold, but it has been left up to local agencies to decide how to reduce wood smoke.

“Let’s face it,” said George Erdman, an air pollution specialist with the Northern Sonoma County Air Pollution Control District. “Air pollution control issues really come down to the individual: The way you heat your home, the way you commute, the way you use cosmetics, the way you light your barbecue.”

Places such as Quincy, Truckee, Mammoth Lakes, Cloverdale and Petaluma have moved to curb pollution by requiring that any new wood-burning stove meet EPA standards.

Mammoth Lakes, the most aggressive California town in tackling wood smoke, goes even further, prohibiting burning on winter days when conditions are worst.

In the San Francisco Bay Area and the San Joaquin Valley, air quality districts have adopted voluntary programs asking citizens not to burn when the air quality is bad.

But these measures fall short of what some cities outside California are doing.

Reno, for example, not only prohibits burning on bad days but also has banned the installation of any wood-burning appliance--including EPA-approved stoves--in the most polluted parts of the city.

Debate over wood smoke pollution arose in Quincy when school district employee Joyce Scroggs made it an issue in her successful 1989 campaign for Plumas County supervisor.

People from the flatlands were moving to Quincy for its clean mountain air and found instead that they were choking on smoke. With the steadily growing population, even some longtime residents were annoyed by the thick blanket of smoke hanging over their valley on some winter days.

“The history of living in these rural areas is that everyone loves the smell of wood smoke and it’s part of the ambience,” Scroggs said. “But it became clear it was a real pollution problem.”

Local air monitoring showed that at its worst, Quincy’s particle pollution was more than double the federal standard and seven times higher than the state standard, she said.

Even without scientific studies, it was obvious to health experts in Quincy that some residents were suffering a variety of illnesses from wood smoke, including bronchitis, asthma and sinusitis.

But the options were limited. At least two-thirds of Quincy’s 5,000 inhabitants depend on wood stoves for their heat. “You can’t tell people you can’t burn a wood stove,” Scroggs said. And requiring them to spend $2,000 or so to install new stoves also was out of the question.

In the end, Quincy decided to require installation of clean-burning stoves when homes are sold--a policy that will have little direct effect on most residents and could take decades to clear the air.

The town also has tried to limit open burning of leaves and debris to certain times of year, but with mixed results. Many old-timers resent the idea of government telling them when they can burn.

For Scroggs, even such modest steps proved too controversial. She lost her bid for reelection last year, she said, in part because of her efforts to reduce wood smoke pollution.

Even with the new rules, nurse practitioner Kathleen Price said patients with respiratory problems start filling her office as soon as the weather turns cold and the fires start up. “You can set your clock by it,” she said. “We see a lot of people who are just miserable all winter.”

John Crouch, a Sacramento spokesman for wood stove manufacturers, encourages towns to adopt regulations requiring cleaner-burning stoves. Tougher rules would mean more sales for the companies he represents--and could stave off burning bans sought by activists such as Mary Rozenberg.

When the issue has come up in some communities, Crouch has been known to set up an EPA-certified stove outside the town hall to demonstrate how little visible pollution it produces.

Smoke is merely unburned fuel, he notes, and with the new stoves, most of it is trapped and burned, increasing fuel efficiency as well as reducing pollution. “There are thousands of tons of wood smoke emitted in this state every day that don’t need to be,” he says.

But Rozenberg argues that even the cleanest-burning stoves are far more polluting than natural gas or propane.

She points out that after the London smog of 1952 killed 4,000 people, Great Britain banned the burning of solid fuels in metropolitan areas and subsidized conversion to cleaner energy. This, she said, is something the United States could do too.

She cites the case of Rosemary Fox, a Bay Area widow in her mid-60s and Burning Issues member whose ill health was made worse by her neighbor’s wood fires. Her doctor concluded that her exposure to smoke particles was life threatening, and Fox desperately sought intervention from lawmakers and government officials without success.

Shortly before her death from heart disease last year, Fox pleaded for help in a letter to then-EPA Administrator William Reilly: “All those long hours of gasping for oxygen with increasing chest pains, coughing and wheezing from particulate matter, and persistent bleeding from the nose . . . have taken a toll on my health and ruined my ability to enjoy my retirement years.”

Rozenberg said wood smoke particles are so fine that they can remain in the air for three weeks and travel 700 miles. Scientists have found that many constituents of tobacco smoke are also produced by burning wood; some are known to cause cancer, such as formaldehyde and benzopyrene.

“If you knew how dangerous wood smoke is, would you want to expose yourself or your children?” she asked. “In this state, this Wild West attitude is insane.”

Stove Standards

In addition to requiring that newly installed wood stoves meet EPA standards, these communities have adopted other measures to curb their wood-smoke pollution.

* Mammoth Lakes: Fires prohibited on days when high levels of wood-smoke pollution are expected. Any wood stove or fireplace that does not meet EPA standards must be removed or replaced when a home is sold. New homes limited to one EPA-approved wood-burning appliance.

* Quincy: Wood stoves that do not meet EPA standards must be removed when a home is sold.

* Lake Tahoe: Wood stoves that fail EPA standards must be removed when a home is sold. New multiunit projects are restricted to one wood-burning appliance per building.

* Truckee: Housing developers can be required to pay a fee or remove high-polluting wood stoves elsewhere in town to offset the effect of wood burning.

* Cloverdale: Construction of any wood-burning masonry fireplace is prohibited.

Note: Stoves certified by the EPA as clean burning emit no more than 7.5 grams of particulate matter an hour. This can reduce emissions as much as 90% over wood stoves and fireplaces manufactured before 1988.