CALIFORNIA
Light a fire at home, pay a $400 fine. Burning wood fires in home fireplaces and stoves on bad air nights in the Bay Area becomes illegal again as of Sunday, when the region enters its second cold-weather season with lighting up banned during Spare the Air alerts. The crackdown, aimed at protecting public health from smoke, has two significant changes this year, the Bay Area Air Quality Management announced Wednesday:
- The district will slap a fixed fine of $400 on second-time violators, who received a written warning the first time they burned on a dirty-air night. Violators last year were subject to an indeterminate fine that could have been in the thousands of dollars. In the end, only person in the region — a Santa Rosa resident — ended up with a $400 fine.
"We don't want to stomp on people's Norman Rockwell experience, but one neighbor's smoke can end up causing another neighbor's visit to the hospital. Smoke can trigger an asthma or heart attack," said Mark Ross, a Martinez city council member on the nine-county air pollution board. "Wood smoke is a public health threat."
The air district also will give the public more advance notice this year of no-burn alerts — 10 hours instead of two hours. [So we should all be grateful.]
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