Gabriola Island Clean Air Society

Susy Mallin shares with the Gabriola Island Clean Air Society her story about wood smoke and how it has affected her life. She lives in Port Alberni, BC and this woman is out of options. How does your right to burn trump these concerns? My story is one of a vibrant, creative and full life gone very wrong due to the belief that burning wood is harmless to ones self and others. I myself once lived under this misconception and now realize that no one has the right to inflict the terrible toxic harm that comes from any kind of wood burning. I had always had a fireplace in my home. In the 70’s I lived in the Slocan Valley and burned wood as a heat source. My youngest child was a toddler, and developed bronchitis that became so bad she spent 2-3 months a year for about 3 years in the hospital in an oxygen tent. No one connected my daughter’s illness to the burning of wood in our home, and the concentration of wood smoke in the environment which was created from all...

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE: Wood Smoke is a Serious Health Hazard (April 6, 2017, Vancouver, British Columbia)— Vicki Morell feels like a prisoner in her own home. And she warns that if it happened to her and her family, it can happen to you too.  The misery began 12 years ago when wood smoke from a neighbour’s fireplace began to permeate the Morell family’s home. The smoke gives Morell headaches and causes burning eyes and other health effects. “My wood-burning neighbours have told me that it is their right to burn wood,” said Morell. "But what about my right to breathe fresh clean air in my own home? I don’t understand why the right to burn wood outweighs another’s right to breathe clean air.” Morell used to think that closing windows would keep out the wood smoke, but she soon discovered that she was wrong. Wood smoke particles are far smaller than the width of a human hair — so tiny that, research has shown, the insides of nearby houses can wind up having ...

Please consider reading this article/declaration on the risks associated with exposure to wood smoke. It was written by a coalition of scientists, physicians, and others. Unfortunately no local media or even provincial media will touch this topic. Please feel free to share it. Heating Your Home With Wood Is More Dangerous Than You Likely Realize It may be natural, but there’s nothing safe or environmentally sound about heating your home with wood or clearing debris and yard waste in a burn barrel or pile. Many communities around North America and elsewhere are grappling with how best to manage exposure to wood smoke, and to understand more fully the community level and individual impacts associated with this serious and growing environmental health risk issue. Currently 1 in 9 deaths on a global scale are due to air pollution. In Canada, air pollution kills 9 times more people than automobile accidents.  In many rural communities in British Columbia, the main sour...

If you thought that air pollution was a more general phenomenon, you thought wrong. Wood smoke from wood stoves and fireplaces creates these hyper local risk environments. These screenshots show how massively different risk levels can be from one spot on Gabriola Island to another. The reading of 157 on the AQI scale is very high and what you would expect in Beijing or Delhi and not a little island of 4000 people with no industry or traffic. Note how much higher these readings are from other spots with AQIs of 1 only a few kilometres away. The graph in the second image shows the prototypical pattern from wood burning and nothing else.

Here once again is the power of data and the "swarming" approach that we have on Gabriola Island and elsewhere thanks to low-cost, realtime air quality sensors made available through PurpleAir. Our 8 sensors on Gabriola Island show the hyperlocal effects of wood burning on local air sheds. The Berry Point Road sensor is showing a sustained and dangerous pattern of particulate pollution for the past hour. You should also note the sawtooth pattern on roughly an hourly basis that accompanies wood burning from wood stoves and fireplaces. This is an extremely risky environment to live around, yet the cognitive dissonance and the rationalizations of those who generate problems like this create blind spots. This is why regulation and a proactive position by local governments is needed, and also why other organizations like the BC Lung Association need to come out strong against all wood burning.

Just another day here on Gabriola Island and another example of the hyper local effects of wood burning on air quality. This particular chimney (connected to an EPA airtight wood stove) is almost solely responsible for these unacceptably high readings. Note the other readings on the island from our "swarm" of PurpleAir sensors to see the localization of the effect.

Here's a good example from our 8 PurpleAir sensors on Gabriola Island of industrial pollution affecting the entire region. We're guessing that this is pollution from the Harmac mill in Nanaimo given the shape of the curve, distribution and timing at different sensors with those located closer to the mill spiking first. There was a uniform increase in levels across all sensors between 7-8PM tonight. This rules out other sources like domestic wood burning although a more detail-oriented eye will see those spikes as well within individual patterns - it may also suggest the arrival of an inversion.