Posted: Wednesday, February 4, 2009 12:00 am
Aug. 6 will mark the 40th anniversary of what came to be called "Black Tuesday" in western Oregon. Thousands of smoke columns from harvested grass seed fields rose into the sky. A shift in the wind flattened the rising smoke to the east and south, where it settled in a choking blanket over Lebanon, Sweet Home and Eugene.
Oregon Gov. Tom McCall was in Eugene that day in 1969, when 315,000 acres were burned. McCall took a long look, he took a breath and when he got back to Salem, he declared a 10-day emergency field burning ban. Soon the Legislature declared that field burning was a health hazard that needed to be phased out. But the talk cooled.
It hadn't been phased out when, almost 19 years later on Aug. 3, 1988, a grass field burn jumped a firebreak and sparked a fast-moving blaze in an unharvested field. Black smoke billowed across Interstate 5 south of Albany. When it had cleared, seven people were dead and 38 injured in a fiery 23-vehicle pile-up.
We do not minimize the drama and tragedy of fire and flames. But we do ask for cooler heads to prevail regarding both where we find ourselves now, and what is being asked of an industry that has responded with good faith for the past 21 years by doing better than all timetables.
Gov. Ted Kulongoski is leading a push to ban field burning outright by 2011 via House Bill 2183. We don't think the bill is necessary.
Now farmers are permitted to burn up to 65,000 acres a year. But they don't. Last year, they torched 38,173 acres on 12 days, with 76 percent of the acres burned on six of those days. For the most part, except for those people who call to complain anytime they see a burn in progress, we cannot recall the last time we've seen the orange, soot-filled skies.
Burning has become a clean and well-operated science. A swirling fire is started at the borders of a field into the middle, where the fire snuffs itself out. Farmers also have found many alternative uses for the straw and alternatives to burning, with about 600,000 tons of Oregon going to Japan.
But as much as farmers have done to eliminate this practice in the face of public pressure, we don't want to see them turn their fields into subdivisions if, as they contend, they cannot make a financial go of it without at least some burning to fight fungus and pests in a cost-effective way.
And when you read Peter Courtney's persuasive column on the state's stimulus package, we're forced to ask: Wouldn't HB 2183 be a shot at the heart of one of the the mid-valleys largest and most viable industries and employers? We think that's a shot that will backfire.
We are not convinced that the current levels of field burning pose the kind of health threat that turning grass fields into subdivisions would pose - a very real possibility despite dismissals by those who want to demonize and oversimplify an issue that calls for a cool, deliberative approach.
FOR MORE BACKGROUND
An excellent summary of the grass seed industry and field burning was published last summer in Oregon's Agricultural Progress magazine, a well-reviewed publication on research by the Oregon Agricultural Experiment Station that provided some background information for this editorial. To read the article, see http://oregonprogress.oregonstate.edu/story.php?S_No=222&storyType=oap&page=1.