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Sunday, February 27, 2011

Environment - Wood-fired outdoor boilers rule up for final adoption Wed. by the Indiana APCB [Updated]

Five years in the making, a rule to regulate the use of wood-fired outdoor boilers is up for final adoption Wed. by the APCB.

An AP story today in the Lafayette Journal Courier begins:

INDIANAPOLIS — Activists warn that smoky exhaust from the outdoor wood-burning furnaces that thousands of Indiana homeowners use to heat their homes is harming the health of nearby residents, and they hope to persuade a state board to toughen up Indiana’s first restrictions on them.

The Indiana Air Pollution Control Board is set to vote Wednesday on final approval of the rules after giving them its preliminary nod in September.

But activists contend that as written, Indiana’s first statewide rules on the stand-alone furnaces called wood boilers or hydronic heaters don’t go nearly far enough to protect people living near them from the irritating smoke-clouds that older models can release.

The story concludes:
Perras said she hopes that reality will convince the board to add a nuisance provision to the rules allowing homeowners to submit to IDEM inspectors photos or video or the smoke clouds they confront to prompt intervention. She said her proposal is modeled after a system Maine uses to help aggrieved homeowners.

Susan Bem, an environmental manager in IDEM’s rule development section, said it’s concerned about the possibility that the video or images could be altered to make smoke appear denser than it actually was.

Perras said Indiana could address such concerns by stipulating, as Maine has, what type of photographic evidence they would accept, including using state-owned cameras to collect that data.

“Hopefully, we can persuade them to add a few more teeth to the rule,” she said.

[Updated 2/28/11] See also this story in the Lafayette Journal Courier, reported by Dorothy Schneider, headed "State rules for wood furnaces may harden."

Posted by Marcia Oddi on February 27, 2011 04:28 PM
Posted to Environment