Bid to Ban Trash Burn in Barrels Fires Up Rural Folk

On garbage day, Dennis Lorenzetti worries not about beating the trash truck to the curb. There is no trash service for his forested acre here on California’s northern outskirts. There isn’t even a curb for a trash can, only a carpet of pine needles.

So out he heads behind the cedar-sided wood shop, alongside the pigpen, where his teenagers keep three hogs. There between the pines, Lorenzetti practices rural America’s time-tested method of garbage disposal: He fires up the burn barrel.

In a ritual passed from forgotten generations, Lorenzetti strikes a fat box match and sets fire to junk mail, cereal boxes and other paper products, all of it nestled in a rusty old 55-gallon steel drum. In the morning calm, flames flick up through a metal screen set on top. White smoke wafts into Siskiyou County’s unblemished sky.

“It’s like a little bit of Americana,” said the high school teacher, a smile hiding behind a bushy beard flecked with gray. “This is a way of life up here.”

Quaint as it seems, this emblem of the outback is in danger of extinction. The California Air Resources Board is looking to ban the burn barrel as a pollution hazard.

Air regulators say the 8,000 burn barrels still in use throughout the state emit a nasty mix of dioxin and other toxic substances that pose a potent health hazard to anyone within sniffing distance.

But the proposed ban has rural residents like Lorenzetti more than a tad ticked off. To them, it seems another example of the urban world lording over rural communities better left alone. From restrictions on the timber and mining industry to last summer’s water war in the Klamath Basin, rural residents are feeling dumped on.

“I appreciate the state being concerned over toxins, I really do,” Lorenzetti said. “Philosophically, this is a big deal. I guess I get tired of people in Sacramento determining what we do up here.”

California’s air regulators say there’s no big brother conspiracy afoot, just an effort to ensure public health.

Although the barrels are scattered in regions that typically enjoy clean air, the smoke they generate can cause serious pollution problems, regulators say. Plastic containers, resins in cardboard, the glossy color paper of magazines, even the little see-through plastic portion of billing envelopes can send noxious fumes into the air.

Those particles can be inhaled or settle on the ground. Toxic substances can then get into water, soil or plants, be ingested by fish and livestock, careening into the food chain. Dioxins, furans, benzene and butadiene can cause cancer and damage the immune system.

The smoke can also trigger asthma attacks and other breathing problems. Infants and small children are particularly vulnerable.

“You can not just affect your own health, but the health of neighbors for miles around,” said Gennet Paauwe, a state air board spokeswoman. And with encroaching suburbia, she said, such practices inherited from the past become harder to justify even in remote corners of California.

“We don’t live in a state with a few people like we did 100 years ago,” she said.

The air board will consider the ban in February, though the new rules would not go into effect until midway through 2003.

In the meantime, air regulators are in the process of holding workshops in the far corners of the state, places like Susanville, Alturas, Hollister and Alpine.

The response has been less than friendly.

In Yreka a few weeks ago, about two dozen irate citizens showed up with one message for state officials: Don’t ban the barrel.

“People were pretty hot,” said Bill Hoy, a county supervisor whose family has raised cattle in Shasta Valley near Weed since 1856. Hoy, who uses a burn barrel, calls the regulation “ridiculous.”

This is, after all, a place where burn barrels are a regular raffle item at the county fair.

“We’re at the very tip of California up here,” Hoy said. “There’s so many regulations generated for problems in San Francisco or Los Angeles that just don’t apply up here. It’s issues like this burn barrel that make you feel like we’re a poor stepchild, the forgotten child of the state.”

Hoy sees potential hardship, particularly for elderly residents forced down icy roads to make extra winter dump runs at Siskiyou County’s lone landfill.

Others would be faced with hefty costs for special garbage service; in Yreka, the local garbage company serves only residents within the city limits.

Other residents, Hoy predicts, will simply burn waste paper in their wood stoves, defeating the purpose of the rule.

As for the air pollution arguments, most folks in Siskiyou County’s valleys have a hard time buying it.

With a population density of seven people per square mile, Siskiyou County has among the nation’s cleanest air, as long as a summer forest fire isn’t raging.

Bill Stephans, the county’s agriculture commissioner and local air board executive, said Siskiyou’s last air pollution violation was more than five years ago, when an inversion layer boxed in chimney smoke for a day.

Stephans sees a safety issue. If barrels are banned, folks trying to burn pine needles and fallen wood slash in uncontained bonfires could unwittingly set off unchecked infernos.

“I just don’t see the benefits outweighing the risks,” he said.

State regulators are talking about allowing exemptions for far-flung homesteads or in areas where the cost of getting special garbage service is deemed too great.

Paauwe said the board will work with local districts to craft the rule to reduce hardships.

Down the road from Lorenzetti’s house, Frank and Peggy Fick dread the possible arrival of a burn barrel ban.

“It’s just one more thing, one more picky thing,” Peggy grumbled as she whipped up loaves of fresh bread in the couple’s spotless single-story home.

Frank, a retired U.S. Forest Service timber expert, sees the ban as the sort of “one-size-fits-all solution” that rankles rural folk. For him, it would just mean more dump runs.

None of this is to say the Ficks or other residents hereabout are part of America’s throw-away culture. Just the opposite. They recycle most everything.

Behind the house, the Ficks have half a dozen garbage cans, one each for the newspapers, aluminum cans, glass bottles and trash destined for the county dump.

“What’s left that can’t be recycled, we burn it,” he said.

Added Peggy: “And all the ash goes in the garden,” a revelation that no doubt has California health officials wincing.

Frank confesses that he enjoys the little ritual of igniting his trash, performed about once a week.

He walks out back, next to the open shed piled neatly to the rafters with this winter’s cleaved stacks of wood. The burn barrel stands proudly, a rusty hulk of metal awaiting its appointed rounds.

“There’s my lovely burn barrel!” he gushes, unprompted.

A strike of a match, and flames spread up an empty dog kibble bag, over to the paper carton that once held a 12-pack of Miller beer.

“That’s all it takes,” Frank observes before retreating.

And if the state bans the darn things? He won’t speak for himself, but he feels confident about the response of his rural neighbors.

“Won’t make a difference,” he sums up. “They’ll burn anyway.”