Get A Burn History

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Before you buy, get a burn history.

Many people burn leaves, brush, trash and other things on their lawns. They may or may not burn in the same place each time. Some people enjoy a campfire. Their behavior may or may not be legal.

Every burn spot is loaded with dioxins. There are 215 different ones generated with every burn, 17 of which are among the most hazardous and toxic substances known to man. That goes for burning leaves and lawn debris. Every burn of yard waste leaves behind dioxins as well as a chemical cocktail of many other hazardous chemical compounds, at the burn spot and anywhere the smoke has inundated. You don't have to burn hazardous waste to create a superfund site.

Dioxins persist in the soil for decades. There is essentially no way to get rid of them. Like many other highly toxic and hazardous substances, they don't photo degrade and they don't biodegrade. If background levels of certain substances are becoming lower over time, its not because they finally fell apart and disappeared, its because they are being stored somewhere.

The amorphous carbon they leave behind (charcoal) with then act like any charcoal filter. Charcoal has a high affinity for highly toxic substances and a fairly low affinity for non toxic ones and beneficial minerals. The charcoal or carbon they leave behind has tremendous surface area and is capable of binding several times its own weight in toxic substances. As soon as the burning ceases the charcoal machine starts running. It immediately starts grabbing toxic substances out of the air and binding them. The ideal gas laws tell us that a gas spreads out to fill its container, regardless of any other gases present. As soon as these molecules are adsorbed onto the carbon, more of the same kind rush in to take their place. Amorphous carbon is like a magnet for hazardous waste. Like any magnet it does not require a specific set of conditions to work properly. This magnet runs 24/7/365. Ambient conditions are within the boundaries of this machine

Every time someone burns lawn debris they generate 0.2 lbs of pollution and 0.32 lbs of amorphous carbon for every 1 lb of lawn debris that they burn. A typical mature tree may yield 100 lbs of leaves. Every lb of burning leaves generates the pollution equivalent to 350 packs of cigarettes.

In addition to the amorphous carbon and the dioxins, PCB's (polychlorinated biphenyls), PAH (polyacyclic hydrocarbons) and VOC's are left behind.

Man has been using carbon or charcoal for thousands of years to gather and sequester toxic substances.

If there are 0.32 lbs of amorphous carbon or charcoal left behind for every single pound of lawn debris burned, then the leaves from a single mature tree can generate 32 lbs of carbon. Consider someone with 10 mature trees. They are adding 320 lbs of charcoal to their lawns every year. If they do this for 10 years, that's 3200 lbs of charcoal. That does not include brush, garbage or other things. Some people burn everything, regardless if it is legal or not. Compare that amount of charcoal to the amount typically found in an average household air cleaner.

Once that charcoal is in the lawn it never comes out. Its just like the terra preta soils in South America. The indigenous people did not open burn. They burned responsibly, underground and found out that they can enrich their very poor soils. Thousands of years later that charcoal is still there. Charcoal does not eventually get broken down and degrade like organic matter.

That charcoal collects and sequesters all sorts of toxic and hazardous material every single time the wind blows by it and grabs toxic substances out of the rain every time the rain falls upon it. When it rains or when snow melts it may have the effect of backwashing the charcoal filter and those compounds that backwash out then become one with any organic matter in the soil.

Once it is in the soil, it may then move through the soil and keep spreading out from its initial location. This makes room for more to take its place. Whether or not it moves depends on many factors such as whether or not it is soluble, what it is bound to, what the cationic exchange rate of the soil is and many other factors.

Kids play in the dirt and kids eat dirt. They track dirt all over the house. Not just the floors, the furniture too. A household pet will do the same. If you intend to grow your own food, these types of properties are not recommended. Any biological organism is also a bioconcentrator and all that poison that you consume will become an almost permanent addition to your body as you body stores that sort of thing in fat cells, not having a better solution to get rid of it. When your fat cells break down, this toxic cocktail infiltrates your body and makes you sick. The more exposure you have, the greater your own body burden and the older you get, the less you are able to tolerate the toxic exposure.

There is plenty of scientific evidence online citing these facts.

When people don't keep their smoke to themselves, that smoke pollution and soot is carrying all sorts of heavy metals, dioxins, VOCs, PCBs, PAHs and so forth. This stuff is settling on your land if you are an abutter and leaving you decades worth of pollution. Read about dioxins in our food supply and where it is coming from.

If they decide to inundate you instead or in addition to, every lb of leaves is worth 350 packs of cigarettes. That's per lb of leaves. Per tree, its worth 35,000. Those small particles get deep in your lungs and don't come out for years. In the meantime, you get to walk around with lung damage, persistent irritation, persistent immunological response to it and possibly have it trigger an entire cascade of negative health effects. Its amazing that so many states outlaw second hand smoke, recognizing the health effects, but don't outlaw this. The second hand smoke from a single cigarette just doesn't compare. They may have a right to do whatever the law allows on their own property. The second they extend their activities onto yours, or into your house and body, then its your business. They are entirely responsible for the fires that they light. If they don't have enough land to support their activities, they shouldn't be engaging in the activitiy.

Not everyone burns things in their lawns, even if they are allowed to. Depending on whether or not they are socially considerate or nuisances, the abutting properties may all be polluted or even visibly vandalized from their smoke damage.

Those that do burn things also seem to have a tendency to light their fire piles as far away from their own buildings and home as possible and proceed to vandalize yours and everyone elses. Its not as if they are oblivious to the damage they are doing. That's why they get as far away as they can from their own. They should be lighting these fire piles right next to their own houses and letting their attic eave vents take up all the smoke so all the soot is stored in their own attics. They should make sure everything else gets permanently stuck to their own homes, decks, garages, vehicles, lawns and gardens. They should open all the doors and windows during this activity to insure that the smoke damage is inundating everything in their own houses, instead of forcing you to close yours when you really wanted to air out your house. All houses have leaks. Some leak more than others. There is no way to keep all of that soot and smoke out of the house. It may also be infiltrating the insulation and permanently becoming one with it. The outside air barrier is typically 5 – 10 times more air permeable than the inside and the particles involved require a real HEPA filter to trap the majority. They require a certain storage capacity for all of the pollution they generate and they can't use your property or anyone elses for that. Maybe you should ask some key questions about the abutters before you buy. If any business did that, they'd make headline news for the next 6 months. There would be interviews with all the victims and the impact it had on their lives. There would be long term health effects to deal with and psychological impact. The cleanup would be very carefully tracked. They would be sued from here to kingdom come for all the damage that they did. The property would be flagged as a environmental hazard. There is a really good reason for all of that.

Be careful about where your food came from. To some people an open field is public property. If that privately owned field is farmed for food, the food may be covered with soot or has bioconcentrated all sorts of pollution. This concept gives locally grown food a whole new meaning. If your local area has this habit, you may want to avoid locally grown food. Using fire is not allowed for organic farming as the highly toxic pollution factor is widely recognized.

Many of these people rake up their leaves, collect up their brush and burn along the road. The carbon is then likely going to sequester road run off chemicals as well as what it would have sequestered if it was far from the road. When it rains, some of those chemical compounds may backwash out of the carbon filter material and bind with the organic matter in the lawn. Studies have shown that water inundation of soils tend to move out laterally first, then downward. If the street is higher than the house, then it could be moving toward the house and may even eventually become one with the basement. Then you get to live directly on a superfund site, instead of just being totally surrounded by one.

Many states have laws, legal processes and professionals that specialize in determining the amount and type of pollution on any piece of land. These are such well known facts, a burn history is usually the first thing on the list of pollution hazards. There is plenty of documentation online discussing what happens and what is left behind with any burning. It isn't just carbon and dioxins. Depending on what was burnt and what it contains, there is an extensive list of plenty of other things that are also left behind, or have polluted anything they came in contact with, with the smoke. Also make sure a building didn't burn down on the location. Consider what is inside a typical building or what happens if a car or other piece of machinery is involved in a major fire and pollutes the soil.

If the laws change in the future or people become more aware of these facts, they might demand a burn history from you as the seller. Even if you never burned anything the previous owners may have left the place like a super fund site and you will be held responsible for cleaning it up.

If the current owners haven't owned the place for decades then maybe you should insist that they foot the bill for a clean bill of pollution health on the property. In many states if you can prove that you did not create the problem you will not be held responsible for cleaning it up either. Without that legal documentation, you can be held responsible for cleaning it up and if the laws change, or people become insistent on pollution documentation before buying, you could be facing a real problem.

If you check statistics you will find that open burning accounts for nearly half of our air pollution problem. Its amazingly irresponsible and socially inconsiderate. Air is a shared resource and its appalling that someone has the right to pollute it for others, especially in their vicinity, while also polluting abutting land, damaging buildings, personal property, poisoning the food supply and eventually the drinking water. It isn't fair for someone that has no right being your life in the first place, to suddenly decide one day that you are going to suffer with years worth of health effects. They also don't have a right to completely infiltrate and permanently add all kinds of soot to your insulation and other components of your home. If you house stinks like a campfire all the time, maybe that's why. If you get hit at a vulnerable time, you may never recover and get your health back. The EPA has gone to great lengths to regulate automobiles and industry. They do not regulate this behavior. The type of pollution is a major lung irritant and can persist in your lungs for years. If its stuck in your walls or attic, it could be in a constant state of exchange with the indoor air in your house. Its like they are doing it to you 24/7/365. Since their name isn't on the deed and they aren't paying the mortgage, taxes and insurance, they have no right at all.

Information concerning the pollution generated and what it effects is available on the EPA's web site as well as many others

If you want clean air, clean soil, clean water and clean food, you are best avoiding these properties to the fullest extent possible. Someone should start a list of properties where abutters are known to behave this way so that when people are out shopping for a new home, they already know what properties to avoid

Many people feel they don't have a choice. In a nutshell, there really is no reasonable excuse for this behavior. For some reason they must rake up all of their leaves in the fall for instance. Some people believe they kill the lawn. There is no scientific evidence anywhere to support that idea. Shade can kill the grass in a lawn. Many people require some sort of off site disposal for their lawn debris regardless of the fact that the federal EPA, the state DNR or DEQ of most states and even most cities, towns, townships and villages are heavily published on the environmentally friendly and non toxic alternatives, such as composting. There is a reason why a tree drops its leaves at its base for the winter. For those people who have no alternative for trash, its illegal coast to coast to open burn it. The results can be deadly in a few seconds flat for victims in the path of that fire. Many things give off cyanide gas when they burn. A victim in the path of that can literally die in 4 seconds. They might have a right to burn but they don't have a right to break every law on the books and commit murder. For people in the position where they have no choice but to burn their trash, there are highly published materials available with respect to the proper way to do that. Unfortunately, anything that doesn't compost on its own and needs to be burned is right up there with some of the most toxic substances known to man. If you have a choice, you would be advised to avoid properties like that too.

The people responsible for this behavior are making choices. They choose to burn their lawn debris or other things. They choose to select products in packaging that cannot be composted or recycled. They may choose to add a toxic chemical cocktail to their lawns and gardens under the label “fertilizer”. We all make choices. The idea is that you don't want to suffer the consequences of someone elses choices if you wouldn't have made that same choice on your own. With respect to this type of pollution the consequences are highly detrimental and long term. Those poisons don't just magically disappear. Its not out of site out of mind. You cannot always tell a super fund site just by looking at it. Even charcoal gets too small to see. How sensitive any individual is to any chemical compound is a highly individualized thing. It may not seem to be having an effect on the current occupants but you don't know what the long term effects are. When they suddenly come down with later in life diseases or lethal diseases like leukemia, it may not be the result of random chance or genetics.

Regardless if they have a right to burn or not, they don't have any legal right whatsoever to vandalize your property. They are responsible for the fires they light and the damage that they do. Even if the laws allow open burning, they don't have a right to take out a spray can, add some color and smash a few windows so its more suited to how they see themselves and the neighborhood. Smoke damage is vandalism. Turning your property into a superfund site along with their own is not within their rights. When these people are held responsible for cleaning up their vandalism on buildings, inside buildings and on personal property then they finally get the message to keep their activities on their own property and off of yours.

Did you know that the EPA allows a certain amount of radioactive waste to be included with fertilizers? Did you also know this is never on the label? Its not required. Do the same people that rake their leaves up (fertilizer) and burn it, then go out and buy highly toxic chemical fertilizers and smear that all over their lawns too?

Perhaps you should be asking a lot more questions. The burn history tops the list of environmental hazards and any reputable environmental firm can tell you that. From there, you might also want a history of their chemical usage on the property before you let your kids eat the dirt or try to grow food on it. Get a detailed water test if the place has a well, subject to your approval, as a contingency to closing.

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