Charcoal Industry Ignites a Heated Issue in Ozarks

The smoke often comes at nightfall, a familiar intruder in the Ozark wilderness, leaking out for days over the red oaks and hickories until the wind sends it on. On good days, it lifts like a morning fog. On bad days, it clamps down on highways and valleys, leaving black grit on everything it touches--farmland, ponds, cows, romping children.

Mike Patterson does not divide the days. Whenever he comes to fire up one of his family’s kilns--four giant rusting metal dumpsters that slow-burn waste wood into charcoal--Patterson leaves with blackened boots, grime-covered clothes and a face streaked with creosote soot.

“You live with it,” he shrugs.

For decades, Ozark hill families have accepted the choking, dusty nuisance of charcoal fog as a fitting price for hardscrabble prosperity. Hundreds of crude kilns rise like sheet-metal and concrete Stonehenges over the rolling southern Missouri landscape, supplying one-third of the nation’s raw charcoal for barbecue briquettes and commercial filters.

But there are signs that the tolerance of the hills is waning. In recent weeks, as the Environmental Protection Agency took steps to toughen national air pollution standards, air-quality officials cited kilns in the town of Moody, just north of the Arkansas line, for “extraordinarily high” emissions of smoke particles. Federal officials want to reduce combustible air emissions, and the Ozarks’ charcoal industry may be among the first to feel the pinch of stricter national regulations and enforcement.

Wayne Leidwanger, the EPA’s air planning chief in its Kansas City regional office, said the measurements near the Moody kilns were “some of the highest we’ve ever seen in the country.” Air-quality readings throughout the summer approached hazardous levels and EPA officials reported that one July reading was so high it was almost double the agency’s danger zone for air particles--a level 10 times the amount found on a typical day in Los Angeles.

Some hill dwellers have begun to side with the government, a fractious move in country where people still refer to federal alcohol agents--”revenooers”--with spitting contempt. More than 200 residents near the Moody kilns signed anti-charcoal petitions. And two farm neighbors allowed the EPA to install electronic air-quality monitors in their fields to measure smoke plumes.

“Nobody wants to go up against their neighbors,” said Kazie Perkins, whose husband works as a logger, “but we’re killing ourselves with this stuff.”

No one here, not even the Pattersons, dismisses the acrid power of the smoke gushing from the kilns. “You get a mouthful and it can set you to coughing something awful,” Mike Patterson said.

Where they divide is over the question of whether the classic definition of air pollution--the sort of noxious urban pall that has bedeviled cities like Los Angeles and Denver for decades--can truly exist in a wilderness where residents are few, the land seems to go on forever and a fresh gust of wind can always be counted on to disperse the worst of the fallout.

Federal scientists only recently targeted charcoal kilns because they have long had difficulty obtaining accurate readings. “Nobody wanted to let us on their property,” said EPA environmental scientist Josh Tapp.

That changed when farmer David Hawkins agreed a year ago to let the agency erect an air-quality monitor in his pasture. Hawkins, 46, a 14-year resident, was fed up with the smoke issuing from kilns on the adjacent land owned by the West Plains Charcoal company.

Black fog from the kilns leaves deposits on his shoes and pants. It paints the noses of his cows black, masks his car in grit and leaves a dark scum on his pond. “All you can do is wait for the rain,” Hawkins said.

A summer of testing by the EPA produced what Tapp described as “incredible numbers.” The monitor measured the density of air particles less than 10 microns in diameter (a human hair is 50 to 70 microns in diameter). Under federal standards, a cloud of particles denser than 150 micrograms per cubic meter is considered potentially hazardous to human health. A definite hazard is posed by a level of 600 micrograms or higher.

EPA officials said they recorded charcoal-particle densities in Hawkins’ field ranging from 174 to 563 micrograms. On July 5, they found a 1,061 microgram reading--a distinct hazard, Tapp said. By comparison, Los Angeles air-particle readings in 1993 showed densities no greater than 100.

Even more worrisome, Tapp said, the readings only applied to heavier smoke particles. Smaller, finer particles may well be borne for miles by prevailing winds. “Who knows where that material goes,” he said.

West Plains Charcoal kiln manager Steve Moore declined to comment on the EPA claims. But charcoal industry sources said plant officials believe that the EPA readings are faulty--some measurements were made on days when the kilns were inactive.

“If the EPA and the [Missouri] Department of Natural Resources get what they want, this industry will shrivel up,” said Eric Peters, a spokesman for the Missouri Forest Products Assn.

What EPA and state air-quality officials want is for Missouri’s kilns to install what kilns elsewhere in the nation use: afterburners that consume most of the smoky residue inside sealed chambers. Missouri is the only state that allows charcoal kilns to function without afterburners, an exemption guarded by legislators close to the region’s influential timber industry.

Authorities point to neighboring Arkansas, where afterburners have reportedly been installed for $25,000 apiece. Peters insists that the true cost is much higher, close to $100,000--a forbidding price, he says, that would drive most subsistence-level kiln owners like the Pattersons out of business.

Emerging from a cold, rusting kiln, Mike Patterson has his own take on what is needed. “Long as you burn slow, don’t get too greedy to pump out product,” he said, “nature takes its course.”

Patterson’s father, Oliver, owned the Mountain Home kilns in the 1960s, then sold out to a bigger firm to concentrate on his sawmill and a food store. He stayed away from charcoal until a year and a half ago, when he bought back the old kilns.

“It’s just something I know how to do,” Oliver Patterson said. He has passed his knowledge on to his son, a truck driver who is also the kiln’s only full-time tender.

The family’s four kilns sit in a clearing several miles north of Highway 60, west of Mountain Home. A mound of blackened charcoal waits in a concrete hopper for a long-distance trucker who makes regular trips to a Pennsylvania briquette factory. Massive bundles of raw bark and scrap wood discarded by the family’s mill are piled outside the kilns, ready for charring.

There is no hard science to cooking charcoal. Every kiln has its own quirks; every charcoal cooker keeps his secrets. “They’re using 17th century methods,” Tapp said. “We’re measuring with precise electronic equipment, and these guys rely on their wits--no gauges, no thermometers, nothing.”

Patterson piles his wood to the creosote-flaked ceilings of the blackened bins, stacking scraps on pallets so there is adequate oxygen below to feed the fire. The trick is, he says, “to burn cool,” allowing the wood to smolder at low temperatures for four or five days without being consumed to ash.

He works the bins like a pipe organ, opening and tamping holes and flues in the metal with clumps of insulation to keep the fire at low ebb. When day is done, he emerges like a miner from underground, his white cap, camouflage jacket, even his mustache smeared black.

Other kilns in the hills sacrifice product for speed, Patterson says, turning a load of wood to charcoal in two or three days. But the kilns burn hotter, producing more smoke and ash instead of finished product.

“That’s what they did here,” he said, pointing to two of the family’s kilns. The metal sides are buckled out, broken by years of excessive heating by previous owners. “The insides just burned too hot.”

In the years since Oliver Patterson bought back the kilns, clouds of smoke that once hung almost daily over Highway 60 appear to have tapered off, neighbors concede.

Still, several days a year, Glenn Henderson watches from his deck as the valley below vanishes in a grayish haze. And there is more smoke down the road. A few miles east on 60, the highway darkens under wisps of smoke from concrete kilns hidden in a copse of trees. There are nearly 300 kilns in the five counties that surround the Mark Twain National Forest. And some days, residents say, it seems they are all venting smoke.

“I once drove 85 miles on 60, Mountain View to Rolla, covered in charcoal smoke the whole way,” muttered Tom Kruzen, a landscaper and owner of a plant nursery. “When I got there, I smelled like a cigarette filter.”