Field burning begins well, ends poorly

A single, smallish field of bluegrass stubble set alight on the Rathdrum Prairie on Wednesday may have captured the dynamic of the raging debate on the practice of open field burning.

The 300-acre burn was “pretty much textbook,” Sherm Takatori said, “until the last 30 acres.”

Takatori manages the crop residue program for the Idaho Department of Agriculture. He and Dan Redline, air quality specialist for the Idaho Department of Environmental Quality, were among state regulators monitoring the first day of field burning on the Rathdrum Prairie.

The early stages of the burn were nearly perfect, Takatori and Redline said, with the smoke plume rising quickly to reach high-level winds that quickly dispersed the smoke to the northeast. The weather and wind conditions had been checked and rechecked, Takatori said, and neighbors had been alerted. “We even sent up a number of balloons to check wind conditions.”

Then several things happened at once. The fire had nearly burned itself out and the cooling column of smoke was sinking to ground level. The winds kicked around to blow from the north.

“And we had smoke on the ground going into western Post Falls, Stateline and maybe into the Spokane Valley,” Redline said.

“Unfortunately, when you start a field fire, it’s almost impossible to stop it,” Takatori said, noting the ground-hugging smoke headed toward populated areas and Interstate 90 for 15 minutes at most.

“Visibility was down to a mile or so, which is significant,” Redline said. “I saw a number of cars with their headlights on, and it got to the point to where you couldn’t see some of the hills that define the western edge of the prairie.”

In a nutshell, it appears Wednesday’s burn illustrates that open field burning on the Rathdrum Prairie is strictly regulated and closely watched. But it also demonstrates that if something goes awry, there is little elbow room on the prairie – hemmed in and laced through as it is with roads and houses – for a Plan B.

Regulators did receive at least two smoke complaints from the Rathdrum area, Takatori said. It is not known if there were any smoke complaints received from Post Falls, Stateline or Spokane Valley. An operator with the smoke hotline (800-345-1007) said the staff there is merely the answering service. They don’t tally calls.

The weather forecast and a nod to the Festival at Sandpoint – which opens with Lou Rawls at Sandpoint’s Memorial Field tonight – means no burning today on the Rathdrum Prairie, even though farmers on the Coeur d’Alene Indian Reservation and in Boundary County have (as of Wednesday evening) permission to burn.

“I don’t care what the reason is, I’m just happy they are not going to burn. We are very excited our opening night is going to be smoke-free,” Dyno Wahl, executive director of the Festival at Sandpoint, said. Wahl expected a near-sellout of some 3,000 to attend tonight’s open-air concert.

Wahl said that she suspected the weather forecast was being used as an excuse and that the Agriculture Department couldn’t, for political reasons, say it would honor the festival’s request for a burn ban on the two Thursdays when there are concerts.

Not so, Takatori said.

“The Festival at Sandpoint is a factor when we make our burn calls,” he said. Burning could be allowed on a Festival performance Thursday (farmers are already precluded from burning on Fridays, Saturdays and Sundays), but “We would have to have some pretty darn good days, absolutely spot-on days,” Takatori said, “before I would be comfortable giving the authorization for burning. Not only for the people around there, but also for the festival.”

The DEQ’s Redline said Department of Agriculture officials like Takatori have become increasingly sensitive to the political, medical and legal winds swirling around the issue of field burning on the Rathdrum Prairie. It is clear from exhaustive preparation that regulators approach the task seriously.

But Wednesday’s winds showed even the best plans can be scrapped. Regulators placed no air-quality monitors, for example, to the south of the field that was burning because, as Redline noted, the wind never blows that way. So there is no measurement of how much smoke crept along the ground when the plume came down.

“Trying to figure out what the true impact was today will be left to” photographs, Redline said. “This is not only a sensitive agricultural issue, but a sensitive political issue and a sensitive social issue.”