Comments for 0 at http://www.princegeorgecitizen.com , comment 1 to 11 out of 11 comments http://www.princegeorgecitizen.com Sat, 07 Nov 2009 16:21:27 +0100 FeedCreator 1.7.2 http://www.princegeorgecitizen.com/20080404125795/local/news/new-study-new-findings-in-air-quality-research.html#comment-5762 Exactly. In the previous comment before my first one he says the "old people" are constantly burning. Yes, they are keeping warm by the only affordable means they have. I'm sure they don't like air pollution any more than we do. As he pointed out, one of them uses oxygen. Where is the compassion for an elderly couple with a very limited income, obviously retired people who worked a lifetime, only to face poverty in their "golden years". a phrase coined by an obviously optomistic politician. Let's face it, gas or electric heat is just a matter of turning a thermostat up and down. Wood heat is finding wood, chopping wood and kindling, piling wood, constantly bringing it in, feeding a fire. It isn't done for convenience - it's affordability. I don't see any hope for the future for the heating costs to go down. Fixed incomes certainly won't go up to compensate for rising costs. You're right, the government should provide people with high effeciency stoves at no cost. Will it? Of course not. There are higher priorities like costly trips to China, giving up a 2.5 million dollar subsidy on a bridge, etc. What's happened to a society that used to respect and help the elderly? - travhops Tue, 08 Apr 2008 09:46:04 +0100 http://www.princegeorgecitizen.com/20080404125795/local/news/new-study-new-findings-in-air-quality-research.html#comment-5721 I am considering unhooking from gas, throwing out the gas water heater for an on-demand one and getting a wood burning stove with a catalytic converter. Your story is exactly what is happening next door to me. The people are on pensions, and can't afford a $ 4000.00 rip and replace of their stove. The stove exchange program is a joke. People such as yourself should be fully subsidized for brand new high end catalytic converter stoves so that you can heat and have no emissions. If others want to piss and moan about subsidizing wood stove exchanges, all I can say is OK, if not absorb the $ 5000 for exchanging one persons stove, then how about paying for the lifetime of illnesses of everyone else affected by the woodsmoke they produce. That will take hundreds of thousands, lifetimes of supplying operations, oxygen for emphysema sufferers, asthma medications, complications arising from lung diseases, lost time at work, disabilities, strokes, heart attacks, I can go on. Bottome line is we are a small city of 80,000 or so, and if people start adopting wood heat en masse, the air hear will be intolerable and sickness will go up. For those that stomp their feet and have tiny fisted tantrums that they have been heating with wood for 50 years dadgum it and they see no reason to change, all I can say is consider 50 years ago you never had the population, industry, heavy traffic emissions, solvents, chemicals, pesticides, high speed dust clouds from increased traffic and more and more population density. The air is not a garbage can. We need it to live people. - Grog Mon, 07 Apr 2008 13:46:08 +0100 http://www.princegeorgecitizen.com/20080404125795/local/news/new-study-new-findings-in-air-quality-research.html#comment-5720 I think we'll see more wood burning. As a person living on a disability pension, I wish I had another heat source. BC chose to sell BC Gas, prices have sky-rocketed, you need a $280 deposit to get it hooked up - what are people to do? I keep my house chilly and wear sweaters. I just can't afford my natural gas and no matter how cold it is, get behind and they will shut it off. Instead of focusing on wood burners as uncaring polluters, maybe it should be considered it's out of necessity to heat homes. Backyard burning, leaf burning is wrong but using a woodstove for heat is a completely different matter. Winters here are long and cold. - travhops Mon, 07 Apr 2008 12:46:25 +0100 http://www.princegeorgecitizen.com/20080404125795/local/news/new-study-new-findings-in-air-quality-research.html#comment-5716 I told you the entire story. We lost money. We were in the middle of developing the basement and had to abandon the project after we had it all framed in and all the electrical run. We sold the house for about 10 grand over what we paid for it and I am still paying off the Home Improvements loan for that house to this day and for another few years. How would you like to live in a house where you can't open the windows - ever? When my son started choking and coughing and when we ended up in the hospital, then got told he developed asthma, it got personal. On Lemoyne, the prevailing wind for some reason pushes smoke toward the Fraser. I was on the Fraser River side of the house in question. I took pictures of our house on a sunny day with smoke completely encircling it from the house next door, sent them to bylaw services and pleaded for help. They told me they had no laws to help me - the only time this guy had to shut it down was on an air advisory day. That's it. They were the ones that told me I can't choose my neighbours and unfortunately the only thing to do was to move. This was in Nov 04 - before real estate boomed. The same house sold recently for over 220 grand - so we missed out. So when I hear about people chuckling about how wonderful campfire smell is the only thing I can come up with is either they are smokers and don't care because they already destroyed their lungs, or they own a wood stove and are also guilty and not apologetic, or they just simply don't care about anyone else. If people would just make the investment in modern wood stoves with catalytic converters so there are no emissions, I wouldn't be posting here. I'm even thinking about getting one considering the new carbon tax and climbing oil and gas prices. But I will burn clean. I have to or my family gets sick. - Grog Mon, 07 Apr 2008 11:57:15 +0100 http://www.princegeorgecitizen.com/20080404125795/local/news/new-study-new-findings-in-air-quality-research.html#comment-5712 Why? Do you actually think its true? I think there is a little bit of embellishment on the part of the author of that post. To some any woodsmoke is intolerable, so they tend to make things sound a lot worse than what they probably really are. If they sold thier home it was probably because of a bigger reason than woodsmoke. More likely just trying to capitalize on the strong real estate market. - MustBMe Mon, 07 Apr 2008 10:10:38 +0100 http://www.princegeorgecitizen.com/20080404125795/local/news/new-study-new-findings-in-air-quality-research.html#comment-5710 Yes the pulp mill and refinery pollute, yes so do diesel trucks and the BCR site that I work in. However, we were chased out of our nice little house on Lemoyne Place. We had to sell because the idiot next door had an old wood stove, boiling blue smoke out of it 24/7 and we had to slam shut all our windows most days due to the prevailing wind direction and we couldnt even sit in our yard. Ever. I asked him many times to do whatever he could to stop the smoke and he laughed in my face a dozen times and said all he cared about was he didn't have to turn on his furnace and it saved him money. He could care less our little guy developed asthma at age 6 and I did shortly after. We even spent almost $ 11000.00 with Terasen Home Improvements program to tighten up the house to try to keep his smoke out of the house. When driving home I would turn the corner and see a wreath of blue smoke around our house from his chimney. If we left a window open our home smelled like a campfire inside and out. And no, its not a wonderful rustic smell day in and day out. My blood pressure hit the ceiling and we were forced to sell and move. Now we live in another neighbourhood. Lo and behold the old people beside us turn out to be constantly burning. Tonight I am running around slamming windows shut. THANKS for the pollution. As my son and I run for our inhalers we look out and see the delivery truck arriving in their driveway bringing them fresh oxygen tanks. They both have emphysema and one has lung cancer. Gotta love these bottom feeders that can't give a flying rat's ass about how sick they are making their neigbours. One more thing about smoke - the other crime is slash burning. I keep hearing wood smoke attrubuted to home wood burning appliances but if you travel on highways in any direction the forest industry seems to have this practice that no one seems to want to talk about. These massive, monstrous piles with plumes of smoke you can see from space pollute entire valleys with smoke, which travels on the wind into bowl areas like PG. When is someone gonna get off their hands and speak up? WHY DO THEY NEED TO SLASH BURN!???????? - Grog Mon, 07 Apr 2008 09:26:49 +0100 http://www.princegeorgecitizen.com/20080404125795/local/news/new-study-new-findings-in-air-quality-research.html#comment-5685 Read the article before you comment ed. I both live and work downtown and I while I can quite honestly say that I have never encountered wood burning in the downtown area I can also say that a short walk through the older neighborhoods surrounding it reveals that a very large number of people are using older wood burning appliances. While it is true that wood burning appliances are not in use durring the summer there are a lot of back yard fire pits that are. I used to live in the central area of the city and I could look out my back window and see smoke plumes from at least 3 backyard fire pits within a few blocks of my home. A short walk through the millar addition or the crescents durring an air advisory and you can literaly look down a street and spot the ones that have houses burning a fire in an inefficient stove or fireplace. We even walked by a yard with a pit fire burning that didn't even have anyone sitting aroud it. I don't blame them - the thick black smoke comming out of that fire would have been enough to chase anyone indoors. My point is that its not enough to just point a finger at industry and hold them responsible. This study shows that the pulp mills are becomming less and less of a factor and the residents are becomming more and more of a factor in contributing to air pollution. Its easy to blame industry but not quite so easy to take some of that blame yourself. Why is it ok for 5 households to pump out a ton of particulates into the airshed for their own private use but when the city wants to do the same to reduce infrastructure costs and cut down on emmisions from exisating systems the residents throw a hissy fit? - Another Guest Sun, 06 Apr 2008 12:47:32 +0100 http://www.princegeorgecitizen.com/20080404125795/local/news/new-study-new-findings-in-air-quality-research.html#comment-5681 Since nobody else will come out an say it... IT'S THE PULP MILLS I'm tired of the city not addressing the real issue. It's the mills, not stoves or other stupid scapegoats. Burning wood doesn't smell like someone farted. Last time I checked the majority of people have natural gas in this city. - edauntes15 Sun, 06 Apr 2008 12:04:53 +0100 http://www.princegeorgecitizen.com/20080404125795/local/news/new-study-new-findings-in-air-quality-research.html#comment-5671 No I dont. I live about as close to downtown as you can get without actually being right downtown. My defensive attitude is because I have never noticed wood smoke being an issue in the bowl area, ever. If there ever is a concentration of wood smoke downtown you might want to start blaming the dozens of huge slash burns west of town. I have lived in small communities outside PG where burning wood is the norm rather than the exception and the only time wood smoke hung in the air was on very cold days when the barometric pressure was high. Otherwise the smoke rises or blows away. Never was it so bad that it made your clothes smell or caused any type of illness. I just think there is too much talk about wood smoke being a problem because its an easy target and the people who burn wood are easier to legislate and control than the major industry that is the real cause of the air problems. - MustBMe Sun, 06 Apr 2008 07:42:22 +0100 http://www.princegeorgecitizen.com/20080404125795/local/news/new-study-new-findings-in-air-quality-research.html#comment-5669 I would think hardly anyone in the downtown has a wood burning appliance, its more likely that the smoke is settling into downtown from neighborhoods at higher elevations. I guess we have those people top thank for poisoning our air. I am guessing you live in one of those neighborhoods by the level of your defensive reaction. - Another Guest Sat, 05 Apr 2008 23:06:24 +0100 http://www.princegeorgecitizen.com/20080404125795/local/news/new-study-new-findings-in-air-quality-research.html#comment-5667 Give me a break, 10 to 20% of people in downtown use wood as thier heat source? Theres a big difference between heating with wood and using a fireplace occasionally. I can guess the survey question went something like this: "Have you used wood as a heat source in your home in the past year?" Anyone who answered yes to that would automatically be branded as using wood as a heat source. How convenient that they didnt measure the refinery or the plumes of dust from street sweeping we put up with every spring as a major source or particulate. Everyone knows these studies are a huge waste of time and taxpayers money. - MustBMe Sat, 05 Apr 2008 22:57:46 +0100