For the past four years, air quality officials have been using the carrot approach to bring Pierce County’s wood stove polluters into compliance with national health standards.
Now they’re getting ready with the sticks.
A Tacoma-Pierce County task force organized by the Puget Sound Clean Air Agency is expected to sign off next week on a report recommending dramatically enhanced enforcement of burn bans like those in Pierce County last week and a tough new crackdown on wood burners.
Recommended changes include:
- Requiring all wood stove owners to register their stoves and pay fees based on their stove’s efficiency.
- Increasing burn-ban enforcement officers from the current force of 12 people to 75.
- Beginning nighttime surveillance of smoking chimneys using infrared viewers and cameras.
- Requiring all uncertified stoves to be removed from Tacoma and most of Pierce County by August 2015, with stiff fines for those who don’t comply.
There’s still a considerable way to go before the suggested changes become final.
The task force’s recommendations first must go to the Clean Air Agency Board, then to the state Department of Ecology, which will prepare a plan for the federal Environmental Protection Agency to decide on next year.
More opportunities for public involvement will be provided along the way, Clean Air Agency representatives promise.
“We need to solve this problem,” said Craig Kenworthy, the agency’s executive director, “but we need to do it in a way that reflects community values.”
Low-income people whose wood stoves are their only adequate source of heat most likely will continue to be exempt from changes, Kenworthy said.
“The idea that we’re going to let people freeze in their homes is just not accurate,” Kenworthy assured task force members Wednesday at the last of their 11 meetings.
While details of the new enforcement plan still are uncertain, there is no question about the results that must be achieved.
Meeting EPA pollution thresholds is required by federal law, and there’s a 2014 deadline (with a possible extension of one to four years) for lowering the amount of fine pollutants in the air to below 35 micrograms per cubic meter. (One microgram is one-millionth of a gram.)
The EPA has designated the Tacoma-Pierce County area as a “non-attainment area” for air quality standards relating to tiny particulate matter – essentially dust, soot and smoke – which is one of six types of air pollution monitored and regulated by the Clean Air Agency under the federal Clean Air Act.
Fine particulates in the air come from burning wood and fossil fuels, including exhaust from motor vehicles.
Tacoma and Pierce County have no trouble meeting the EPA standard most of the year. But during 10 or so days every winter, when weather conditions create an inversion pattern that traps cold, stagnant air close to the ground, fine particulates build up rapidly.
The Clean Air Agency has concluded that, during those times, most of the Tacoma area’s particulate pollution does not come from industry or automobiles, but from wood-burning stoves, fireplaces and fireplace inserts.
Studies have shown that exposure to fine particle pollution can pose a range of serious health effects because their tiny size allows them to easily enter airways, where they travel deeply into the lungs and circulatory system.
Exposure to fine particle pollution has been linked to respiratory disease, decreased heart and lung function, asthma attacks, strokes and premature death.
According to the Ecology Department, about 1,100 people in Washington die every year because of fine particle pollution.
Tacoma is the only city in the state to be labeled a non-attainment area for fine particulates, a distinction that is not only unhealthy but also bad for business.
If the state can’t create a plan for improving air quality acceptable to the EPA by December 2012, the Clean Air Act requires the EPA to impose its own plan.
Not taking corrective measures would endanger federal funding and grants.
The approach local regulators have taken has not moved the area significantly toward the federal goal.
Over the past four winters the Clean Air Agency, working in conjunction with the City of Tacoma, Pierce County and utility companies, have spent $3.4 million subsidizing people who agree to get rid of their old wood stoves and replace them with cleaner heat sources.
Those programs have been responsible for the replacement of 1,217 stoves – enough to remove an estimated 57 tons of fine particle pollution from the air, according to Amy Warren, a Clean Air Agency spokeswoman.
“That may sound like a lot,” Warren said, “but there are still 24,000 uncertified wood stoves in the nonattainment area. There’s about an equal number of certified wood stoves and inserts and more than 30,000 fireplaces.”
The Clean Air Agency has $1 million in grant funding from the Ecology Department wood smoke reduction in the Tacoma-Pierce County area for the 2012-13 biennium, but it has not yet designed a program to spend it.
“We want it to be responsive to the recommendations of the community-based Clean Air Task Force and to support the requirements of the future state implementation plan,” Warren said.
The task force also emphasized the need for enhancing outreach and education efforts.
“There are a lot of people in this area that don’t have a lot of this information,” said Steve Webber, a community member (and wood stove user) who served on the task force. “I think awareness itself is a huge key.”
Kenworthy said the Clean Air Agency board will hold its January meeting in Tacoma to further discuss options.
Rob Carson, 253-597-8693
rob.carson@thenewstribune.com
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