One week to make fire-ban protests

Press, 25 August 1988, Page 9

One week to make fire-ban protests

Objectors to the open-fire ban planned for Christchurch in 1992 have seven days to send their submissions to the Minister of Health, Mr Caygill, or the Christchurch City Council.

The city council last week debated a motion to set aside the ban, but the final vote was for the ban to proceed. Cr Morgan Fahey has criticised the “unreasonable attitude” of councillors who are pressing for the open-fire ban. He has urged City residents to protest to the council and Mr Caygill before the August 31 closing date.

He has also cited recent research which he says questions the assertion that the open fire is a serious cause of respiratory distress in the city. To support the ban, councillors relied on the findings of a 1975 report, but the findings were not supported by research published in the “New Zealand Medical Journal” in 1983 and 1987.

Cr Fahey said this later

research showed: • There was no relationship between the degree of air pollution in Christchurch and admission rates to hospitals from asthma in all agegroups. “In fact, higher pollutions tended to be characterised by lower hospital attendances,” said Cr Fahey.

• Other factors such as viral causes, wind and temperature changes more than made up for the effects of pollution levels.

• Over a 20-year period in Christchurch, when open fires had decreased in number, there had not only been an increase in asthma and other respiratory distress but also an increase in severity.

“It is also of interest that hospital admission rates now for children

with asthma are similar in Christchurch with high air-pollution to those in Auckland with fewer open fires,” Cr Fahey said. Cr Fahey said too much of the earlier research was based on anecdotal

claims and subjective evidence.

“We have no moral right to pass an act that will force the elderly poor and the young poor to change to other forms of heating, with the certainty that electricity prices will continue to rise,” he said. He accepted that open fires were not efficient and caused pollution. But to many citizens the open fire was a comfort which could not be replaced. “The only hope for our retention of the open fire is for those who are concerned, as I am, about the unreasonable attitude of those councillors who have now banned the open fires in this city, to protest in the strongest terms, immediately to the council and the Minister and to demand a new assessment of the effects of such a ban,” he said.