In January of 2015, Shaw TV in Nanaimo produced the following show about wood smoke pollution on Gabriola Island. It features two of Gabriola Island Clean Air Society founders: David Boehm and Michael Mehta.
If you burn wood to heat your home, you may not realize how many trees are consumed every year by this choice. It's often difficult to see this since most of us have wood delivered in trucks loaded with smaller and sometimes split pieces. On Gabriola Island, our consumption of wood is the equivalent of 545 logging trucks/year of trees, and this consumes 55 Ha (136 acres) of mature forest every year. Much of this wood is imported from woodlots on Vancouver Island. If parked end-to-end, these 545 trucks (21.5m in length) would be 11.75 km long - almost the length of the island. Here's the math and the hyperlinked references to support these calculations. Forests in B.C. are relatively productive compared to other parts of the world. A Ha of mature forest yields on average 400 cubic meters of wood. Not all of this wood can be used as firewood but we'll use this number since data on actual amounts of usable wood are difficult to come by. A lower number of usable quantities...
Our PurpleAir network of realtime air quality monitors is starting to show the first signs of air pollution from the forest fires in the interior of BC. The air quality can change dramatically and quickly as we saw in Kamloops these past two weeks. Keep an eye on our live sensor map by clicking here . There is no provincial air quality monitoring on the island so our citizen science initiative through this non-profit is the place to go for information. We can see the trend line going up rapidly this afternoon around 3PM. These are the current sensor readings for a sister network in Kamloops. Anything over 25 micrograms/cubic meter for a 24 hour averaging period is considered unacceptably high.
For years the province's preeminent charitable organization for all things respiratory, the BC Lung Association, has been receiving money from the provincial government to administer a flawed program to exchange wood stoves. As we've stated elsewhere on this blog, EPA wood stoves are not the answer and emit massive amounts of particulate and other kinds of pollution that contradict the efforts of BC Lung and others to protect public health. By putting their name and team behind the wood stove exchange program, BC Lung is jeopardizing the health of thousands of people. We strongly recommend that they discontinue their support of this program and speak out against all kinds of wood burning practices. One can hardly support lung health research while at the same time willingly and obstinately ignoring a major exposure pathway to lung and heart disease. An earlier call for action provides more details. See here . According to a Senior Air Quality Scientist with the BC Min...
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