I am going to weigh in here with some opinions with which others may or not agree. I live here.
I am in favor of clean air to breathe, clean water to drink and clean dirt to grow food in.
1. The air quality program is complaint driven. You may burn automotive tires in your wood stove and the gummint will not investigage your 100% opaque plume until someone, a civilian, complains. This is totally boneheaded. All Alaskans carry guns, even in their Prius'. Hot chicks in their 20s can be counted on to have a short barreled 44 magnum in a clutch purse. All Americans, under the US Constitution, have the right to confront their accuser in a court of law. Nobody in town wants to be that guy, because the dirty burner is not going to get meaningful jail time.
2. Wintertime air quality is related to trapped emissions from vehicles and wood stoves mostly, plus home heating oil and our three power plants in town somewhat. The two civilian powerplants are heavily regulated, the coal fired powerplant on the Army base is out from under the influence of the EPA. In the summer time when we have forest fire smoke blowing into town, the EPA says they can't do anything about it while they spend millions and millions of dollars on projects and programs that aren't making meaninful differences in our year round air quality.
3. Fairbanks is one of the worst places in North America to build a city because of the temperature inversions. On the other hand it was one of the last habitable places in North America when the most recent ice age got a grip on the climate.
4. Of course cold start up is the dirtiest time in the life of a wood stove. In reality (not in theory), my last cold start was in late October. I probably won't do another cold start on my catalytic stove until March. The idea that my stove may or may not produce 6 grams per hour in the first hour is a useless metric, because the next first hour won't be for 5 months.
5.
@ABMax24 , the city of Fairbanks is not doing this. Nor is the Fairbanks North Star Borough. FNSB is kind of like an American County, only it is about the size of Connecticut and has about 100k people living in it. One or Two election cycles ago a majority of the residents of the borough voted that the FNSB did not have the authority to regulate air quality. As FNSB is a home rule borough, this is a binding limit on the authority of the borough. The EPA is still concerned about PM 2.5 if it comes out of a chimney instead of a forest fire. So regulating burners in the FNSB falls to ADEC, the Alaska Department of Environmental Conservation. You may have heard of an oil tanker named the Exxon Valdez. ADEC does not give a hoot about PM2.5 produced by forest fires either, as it is a natural process; but they have many small sharp knives at their disposal, have since the big oil spill.
6.
@bholler , ADEC does have the responsibility to bring the FNSB air quality required by EPA into "compliance" but they do not apparnetly have the cojones to go after the 30 or so bad burners spoiling it for the rest of us.
7.
@Highbeam all states have the right to create more restrictive laws then federal laws. It is specifically enumerated in the Constitution. Doesn't mean it is a good idea in this instance.
8.
@kennyp2339 again, "but those people that live up there are a much more hardier, resourceful bunch, when government makes things to hard for the everyday Joe, "
Before I start and edit my rant I have no beef with any of the individuals I have dealt with in person at the Fiarbanks ADEC office. They have all been individually polite and helpful. Somewhere up their chain of command someone is being allowed to make bad decisions without correction, but it isn't the local office staff.
I have, so far, been to my local ADEC office three times this fall trying to get a waiver to operate my stove during stage one air quality alerts.
The first time my application was rejected because I hadn't first gone to the FNSB air quality office halfway accross town to get a signature verification that I wasn't eligible for a woodstove change out. I have gotten waivers every year since they were first required and have documented repeatedly, every year since this BS started, that the only dollars that ever flowed back into my pocket was reimbursement for a new wood stove, which I have told them about year after year after year. I do still have my bibles and guns, but not enough coinage in the little drawer in the dashboard of my truck to buy a drip coffee.
The second time, my application was rejected because the application form I downloaded in late August -from ADEC- was no longer valid in mid September. A polite individual provided me the new corrected form free of charge, but this was not noted or corrected at my first visit to ADEC. At this same visit a functionary who has previously signed off on my passive solar firewood kilns as adequate wood storage meeting ADEC standards provided me a phone number to call to be sure he was in the office when my current version application was complete because he isn't in the office every day because of COVID.
So with the signature from FNSB in my hands, and the updated application form completed, I think they need something like seven pictures with the application, another picture of the solid fuel burning device, another picture of the manufacturer's plate, another picture of the mfr date stamped on the mfr plate (thanks
@BKVP ) , another picture of my wood storage area, another picture of my clean inactive combustor, another picture of my active combustor (all these have to have date/time stamps on the image printout) and whatever else, jeez Louise, proof the chimney has been swept in the last year is on there. Right right, so I called the number provided by the functionary, and I got zero useful information. I might as well have called Guam to ask for a wood splitter.
So I drove over there a third time. I got all my ducks in a row, my poop is in a group, this should be a slam dunk. I feel really bad for the little girl at the front desk, because I clearly wasn't the first this year.
If you didn't know already I am a Registered Nurse. I work in Home Health, like a district nurse in the UK, going to the homes of patients who aren't sick enough to be in the hospital but not well enough to go see their doctor in person. For the pandemic I am in white scrubs. Bleach, no starch, because starch causes whites to yellow over time. I can run an iron much better than I can run my BK stove. I have not had a haircut since May. The level two isolation gowns my department is wearing for the pandemic are basically form fitting, water impermeable trashbags. I left the house this morning with three quarts of gatorade in my truck and drank them all before they froze. I frequently have that red wishbone shape from the bridge of my nose down to the corners of mouth you have probably seen on facebook countless times. The biggest problem I had today (thankfully) was the locally owned sub shop I went to for lunch had my sandwich ready before the sweat had thoroughly dried from my scrubs, so I went back out in the cold in wet clothes. On a similar day I showed up at ADEC Fairbanks, for the third time, with a manilla folder containing my ten or twelve page application. Rumpled whites, hospital badge, tired as heck, wild hair, red wishbone centered on my nose not completely visible with my cloth mask on, but I got my completed application in one hand and two phones in the other.
The little girl was terrified. The functionary wasn't in that day. She suggested I schedule myself on the fucntionary's online calendar. Then she, very politely and with no small trepidation, verbally gave me URL that turns out to be not valid and is not google-able.
I am not going to shoot up the Fairbanks office of ADEC. The local employees are doing the best they can with what they have. I am considering canning my stage one waiver application, and blocking the number from which FNSB aire quality alerts are texted.
While I recognize my talents in cell biology and pharmokinetics, such as they are, are useless here, I also know a little bit about applied psychology. It is my opinion, as a Fairbanks resident, that EPA should throw a couple million dollars at upgrading the DoD powerplant and someone somewhere in state government needs to grow a pair to call their own and shut down the 30 or so bad burners that are ruining it for the rest of us without requiring civilian complaint. The rest of the money EPA has laying around for Fairbanks air quality should be given to forestry so they can fight forest fires blowing smoke into Fairbanks during summer months.
M2c.
Peace out, if I get booted from here.
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