The Washington Times reports:
The South Coast Air Quality Management District will decide this summer whether to order the removal of 850 bonfire pits from Los Angeles and Orange county beaches on the pretense that fire is bad for the environment. To support its position, the agency concocted a study concluding that an evening beach fire creates as much particulate matter pollution as a diesel truck driving 564 miles.
I like the way the reporter worded his article, the study was “concocted” to support the position. Sounds like true science.
Howdy tadchem
I’d be very surprised if the pits are anything like 20 ft2. The ones I remember were only a few feet each way, say 9 or 16 ft2. Either way, of course, the fires in the pits are utterly insignificant in the air quality equation of Southern California. Nor would they produce enough CO2 to care about if CO2 was worth caring about which it isn’t.
And yes, a campfire on a beach probably does produce a lot more particulate than a diesel truck. That’s why the “split wood, not atoms” motto seems so silly to me.
You’d like to think the voters of SoCal would be tossing out nannies like this, but you’d be thinking wishfully.
At about 400 square feet per pit (assuming a 20′ square), 850 fire pits represent about 9 acres of fire. Compared to the fires reported on http://cdfdata.fire.ca.gov/incidents/incidents_current this is statistically (and every other way) insignificant. This is not about fires or air quality; this is about bureaucratic power and control of the subject population.