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The fireplace police descended on the Bay Area on Wednesday.
Oh boy, get ready for a rant. I can feel it coming. I can feel the greenie-weenies coming...
For the first time ever, residential fires are illegal under a new law, passed in July, that bans home burning on winter season Spare the Air days.
"Spare the air! Oh please spare the life of our precious air as it gets sucked away by you vile awful sons-of-dogs that have no concept of how to take care of our fragile, fragile earth," he said, perfectly imitating liberal thought.
The first such ban took effect at noon. Seventy inspectors from the Bay Area Air Quality Management District planned to spend the day and evening patrolling residential neighborhoods, looking for telltale chimney wisps.
Oh good, Big Brother has spent several hundred dollars, if not thousands, creating a Secret Police that goes around looking for wisps of smoke from the chimneys of the city. Do these politicians have nothing better to do? "Hey! Yeah, you! Don't you know that chimney smoke is bad for the environment? You better put that out!!" First our factories, then our homes...
Violators will get warnings by mail. Repeat offenders face fines of as much as $2,000.
Always another tax... Of course, you have to love the strongly-worded letter they send you. Maybe they should use this method on North Korea. They've already got the strongly-worded letter stage out of the way, now fine them into oblivion!!
The fireplace police say they are determined to keep law and order in the living room.
Wait, what about the bedroom? Didn't they complain about laws in the Bedroom? But they want laws in the Living Room. Hey! What about the right to privacy we have in the Constitution?! I don't hear anybody talking about THAT now, do I?!
"We're serious," said district spokeswoman Kristine Roselius.
Well, I'm am too. You don't honestly think I do this JUST for fun, do you?
"This is a major health threat. The weather conditions are such that smoke is trapped closer to the ground and anyone with respiratory problems will have a hard time breathing."
Wait wait wait wait wait... Are you telling me that SMOKE, which is mostly hot air, DOESN'T go up into the atmosphere and dissipate over the earth, but CFC's, which are MUCH MUCH HEAVIER than air, do go up into the atmosphere and disperse over the earth and create ozone holes? I'd like to meet your science professors, please. I have a physical message to deliver.
With 1.4 million fireplaces in the Bay Area, Roselius said the district is hoping for voluntary compliance. It notes that wood burning produces about one-third of the particulate pollution on a typical winter night.
I'm sure, but there are smokestacks for a reason: to make the smoke go UP INTO THE AIR and NOT collect on the ground. I'm sure that most of their measuring devices are situated somewhere up on the highest building somewhere.
The district predicts as many as 20 Spare the Air days during the winter season, which air quality officials define as Nov. 1 through Feb. 28. That means it could be illegal to fire up the fireplace as often as one day in every six.
Wait, they "predict" Save the Air days? You mean they're on a whim? Like Ozone Action Days?
Wait wait wait! That's it! They only want more control over you! DUH!!! They have Ozone Action Days in the summer, but they had nothing in the winter, until now! Ozone Action Days in the summer, and Spare the Air Days in the winter! It all makes perfect sense! THEY WANT TO CONTROL YOU!!! (as if that wasn't obvious already).
Similar bans have been in place in the San Joaquin Valley and in the Pacific Northwest for several years.
And I'm sure they'll readily produce hockey-stick graphs to prove that those places worked.
After the initial warning, repeat violators will face fines, some as high as four figures. In other no-burn districts, offenders have been permitted to do penance by attending "smoke school," similar to traffic school.
Oh, fun! Smoke School! I get to go for a 10 week course, paid for by the tax payers no less, about how I SHOULDN'T light my fireplace. So tell me, why do I HAVE a fire place to begin with?!
But the Bay Area is a no-school zone.
I wonder why? Is it because of the high number of things that kids shouldn't see going on here? Hm...
The air quality district declared its Spare the Air Day because of what it called moderate levels of pollution all around the Bay Area. Moderate pollution is expected to remain today in the East Bay, the South Bay and the Santa Clara Valley regions, with good air quality in the North Bay and coastal regions. The district will decide by noon whether to extend the wood-burning ban.
I'm sure they will, for the sake of the polka dotted owl that can only live in snarl-sin-sook forests next to the toot-twanglers and jin-janglers.
The fireplace industry was seeing red about the prospect of more smoke-free days and nights.
As I'm sure they would. After all, we have to bring down those evil corporations.
"This is obviously something we're very concerned about," said Chris Caron, vice president of Duraflame, the Stockton-based purveyor of sawdust fireplace logs.
As you well should be, Mr. Caron. I suggest going into the polka dotted owl protecting business as well, to try and keep your assets in line.
He said he hoped the new ban would not affect the fire log business and that Bay Area residents would burn even more logs on non-Spare the Air days.
Not likely.
"After (the district) gets through trying to scare everyone to death, we expect they will realize that people still want to burn in their fireplaces," Caron said.
Not a cold chance in hell, Mr. Caron. Which, by the way, I highly suggest moving to hell, as I'm sure your log burning business will fare much better there than up here in cold cold San Fransico, et al. No offense intended towards the man, and as much offense as I can muster intended to the stupid environmentalists.
He also said it was unfair to lump cleaner-burning sawdust-based logs with ordinary wood. And he said he was hoping for lots of cold, rainy, windy and miserable weather this winter.
Mr. Caron, have you seen those "clean coal" commercals? These people don't think anything is cleaner burning. And also, they don't care about the environment, they care only about controlling you, Mr. Caron.
"Bad weather is good for us," he said. "And good for air quality."
They beg to differ.
Rich Ventura, proprietor of Rich's Firewood of San Carlos, called the ban "a little excessive." Ventura sells oak fireplace wood for $400 a cord, a quantity of stacked wood that measures 4 by 4 by 8 feet.
Hm... a little shameless plug from the newspaper. How nice.
"They should try education first - that would be a better way to go," he said. "If you build a fire properly, and get it really hot in a wood stove, there's very little smoke."
You don't understand, Mr. Ventura, they don't want education, they want control! MUAHAHAHA!!! I SHALL RULE THE WORLD VIA FIREPLACE CONTROL!!! That's what they say, though maybe less dramatically, though it would be really funny if someone were caught saying that.
Tim Regan of San Francisco said he had already gotten his education and wouldn't be spending Wednesday night burning any of the firewood he was buying at the Safeway on Market Street for $18.
......Then why buy it?
"The environment has to trump comfort," Regan said. "I'm sentimental about these things. A fireplace is so romantic, the curl of the smoke rising up - it's like Norman Rockwell. But I'm willing to make a concession to the planet's health and survival."
I can so totally see him saying this in a high-pitched girly-man voice. "Oh ooh! These things are so romantic. I'd love to curl up with Rockwell and just spoon in front of the fireplace all night!" (Note: Children should not be reading my blog posts. You have been warned, a little too late. :D )
Receive air alerts
For more information on wintertime Spare the Air Days, check the air quality district's Web site, www.baaqmd.gov, or call (877) 466-2876. Residents may also sign up to receive automatic notification of no-burn days, by e-mail or recorded telephone messages.
Yes, if you want to know when the next Government Control Day is, please contact this site or call this number. Thank you for your undeniable cooperation and commitment to saving the polka dotted owl.
E-mail Steve Rubenstein at srubenstein@sfchronicle.com.
Email him if you want, but I don't think he's the guy you want to talk to about this. Maybe Ahnald can handle it instead. Anyhow, that's been Line-By-Line. I love this program. More fun later to day. Bye all!
Thank you for choosing Line-By-Line! Good Bye! C:\> End Transcript.
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