CORNWALL — A local family’s effort to maintain their outdoor wood-burning furnace (OWF) has met with legal resistance. Their proposal to make prescribed modifications, and limit use to the heating season, was denied by the Department of Environmental Protection (DEP) after it was discovered it violates local zoning laws. The furnace is shut down.Donna and Ted Larson thought they were doing something good for their family and the environment when they installed the furnace in 2005 at their Jewell Street home. It provided heat, as an alternative to an oil furnace and indoor woodstove. It affordably met hot water needs for the family of five. Most importantly, it was a way to burn a renewable resource without exacerbating their daughter’s asthma.Their clapboard-sided home, built in the 1800s, is not likely to resist infiltration. Their daughter, whose asthma is provoked by a variety of causes, has not been affected.“We knew we needed to use dry wood and carefully manage the furnace to minimize emissions, and we have been very careful about that,” Donna Larson said. “We went to all our neighbors, who supported us, because of our daughter and the environment. Those people are the same ones who wrote letters of support now.”An anonymous complaint of excessive smoke was filed with the DEP this past winter. The agency has been investigating since January. While initial observations showed that excess smoke was not a problem, it was discovered the furnace wasn’t set back quite far enough from neighboring homes.Ted Larson sought help from the Board of Selectmen and his state legislators. He confirmed that he was issued a building permit by the town building official on Sept. 5, 2005. On Sept. 23, with the furnace already installed, the town received a letter advising of new legislation, enacted the previous July 1, that addresses setbacks from neighboring homes and stack heights. The selectmen and state Sen. Andrew Roraback (R-30) agreed with Larson’s assertion that his furnace should be exempt because he was given a permit before the town was notified of the statutory change. The town would not typically revoke a permit, because existing land uses made nonconforming by new law are usually exempt, or “grandfathered.”Why the permit was issuedLand Use Administrator Karen Nelson was not in office when the permitting occurred, but has researched the matter, and was able to offer a perspective. She said there are five outdoor wood-burning furnaces in Cornwall, and there has always been a jurisdictional issue.“It’s never been clear who was obligated to enforce the DEP’s regulations,” Nelson said. “The town doesn’t address them in zoning regulations, but someone has to issue a permit. Since the DEP won’t, we have been issuing permits as if they were an accessory building, so only setback requirements apply.”Larson’s appeal to the selectmen brought a complaint to the DEP by neighbor Laurie Simmons, who was taken aback by the board’s support, in light of concerns she had brought earlier to the land use office. She said she was waiting for the end of the heating season to press the issue. The Planning and Zoning Commission was apprised last December, but did not address it because it does not regulate furnaces. Simmons, and her husband, Carroll Dunham, work in their artists’ studio that sits as close as 30 feet from the furnace. Both are asthmatics, and contend that smoke, which contains fine particulate matter, gets into the studio.While the law addresses furnace setbacks from residences not served by the furnace, it was discovered that in 2008 a change of use was approved to designate the studio a residence. The proximity between the two was where the matter ended for the DEP. There is no grandfathering of nonconforming outdoor wood-burning furnaces.Nelson said one of the furnaces in town was built so close to adjoining vacant land that if a home were built on that property, the furnace would have to be shut down.The state’s point of viewAt the DEP, Robert Girard, assistant director of the Air Enforcement Program, said the Larson case was closed by the zoning issue.“There was no issue of emissions violations,” Girard said. “Visual inspections were done twice. Further testing would have been done if the zoning issue had not been insurmountable. There was no place on the property that furnace could be situated to be in compliance with either town or state regulations. “But it did appear the Larsons were managing the furnace efficiently.”Girard said it’s up to local building officials to stay on top of new legislation; and that this one was heavily debated and advertised. The law enacted in 2005 also allows for municipalities to enforce the DEP regulations on the furnaces. It makes sense, he said, because local officials are closer to the situations, and know which of their own regulations might apply. That kind of delegating also takes an increasing burden off the state agency.“Our primary job is to check large factories for compliance. We are spending more and more time investigating furnace complaints. It’s a hot button issue right now, and we are required to follow up on every complaint.”Girard said enforcement is complaint driven. They do not inspect residential outdoor wood-burning furnaces. Opposition to the technologyLaws now require catalytic converters to be installed on furnace stacks. Girard said it is “very new technology that remains in its proving stages.”Since outdoor wood-burning furnaces began cropping up across the state, the DEP’s goal has been a statewide ban, according to Girard. “We have pursued an overall ban, but it has never been supported by the Legislature,” he said. “Every legislative session we have proposed bills toward better regulation of furnaces. This year, the chairman of the environmental committee offered a bill that would ban them, except for agricultural uses. We asked for a requirement for future installations to be cleaner burning units that are now available.”The committee-raised bill, SB-830, has seen a dozen amendments and remains on the Senate calendar, along with the DEP proposal.Outdoor wood-burning furnaces could be a good alternative to oil-fired burners, which release sulfur dioxide into the air. But Girard believes most outdoor wood-burning furnaces are not managed properly, making the fine particulate matter a significant issue. He noted the emissions are very different from those from wood stoves.An outdoor wood-burning furnace is controlled by a thermostat.“When the demand for heat is met, a damper closes and the fire dies out, with the heat held in by a water jacket. When the damper opens again, the fire has to reignite from a relatively cold environment, and that causes lots of emissions.”The catalytic converters, which burn emissions a second time and made such a dramatic difference on automotive vehicle exhaust, may well be the solution, Girard said.He referred to research by Nancy Alderman, president of Environment and Human Health Inc. in North Haven, Conn.“She is correct that the furnaces are much worse than other heating sources when it comes to impacts on people.”More information can be found at www.ehhijournal.org.As for the Larsons, they will have to buy a water heater, and they plan to go back to using an indoor woodstove, as long as their daughter can tolerate it.First Selectman Gordon Ridgway and Planning and Zoning Chairman Pat Hare both said there are no plans to write local outdoor wood-burning furnace regulations. “We can’t be any more restrictive than the state is,” Ridgway said, “and now that we know about the latest regulations, we can make sure our permitting is appropriate.”But there is an option to supersede the state, and 21 of 169 Connecticut towns have done so. Sixteen of them simply prohibit use or new installations of outdoor wood-burning furnaces. Two have moratoriums on new installations and two limit use to the heating season. In this area, Salisbury has regulations that require a special permit and Norfolk prohibits use.
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Dick Hermans in the Oblong Bookstore on Millerton\u2019s Main Street in 1985.
Provided
For Hermans, the award has prompted some reflection about why he has spent so much of his life involved in community projects.
“I was thinking about it this morning: Why do I do what I do?” he said. “And I think no matter what I’ve done, whether it’s been school board or rail trail, I’m trying to be useful to the communities I’m associated with.”
Hermans is perhaps best known as the longtime co-founder and steward of Oblong Books in Millerton, a business that began almost by accident. He and his first wife, Holly Nelson, were living in Millerton and looking for something to do during the winter. They had been painting houses, including the Grange Hall in Millerton, a job Hermans got through his aunt, who belonged to the Grange.
At the time, Hermans was also working in insurance for his father, doing collections.
“It was fine except I was doing collections, and it really kind of left me cold,” he said.
He and Nelson began thinking about what they might do together. Nelson was an avid reader, while Hermans had studied journalism and had worked in a record store. They noticed a chain of book and record stores operating elsewhere in the Hudson Valley and decided to follow that model.
And so Oblong was born.
Dick Hermans in the Oblong Bookstore on Millerton’s Main Street in 1985.Provided
“We really learned it by the seat of our pants,” Hermans said.
The business would eventually become a beloved and integral part of Millerton’s commercial life. But although Hermans may have learned the book business as he went, his affinity for retail — and for the connections that happen across a counter — had begun much earlier.
As a child, his second-grade teacher operated a little cardboard pencil shop in the classroom, and Hermans still remembers the satisfaction of selling a pencil for a nickel.
“I really liked selling somebody a pencil for a nickel,” he recalled. “I can remember that experience, and it was so pleasant.”
Later, while living in Arizona, he helped establish a food co-op and worked at the counter.
“I kind of knew that I liked doing that kind of thing,” he said. “It’s a nice way to be pleasant with people, but without making too much commitment to them.”
His relationship with Millerton also predates Oblong. His grandparents lived in the village, and he first came to Millerton as a baby. Over the years, he has watched the town change through several generations.
He remembers a Millerton with a much broader array of businesses, when stores such as Delson’s, the Main Street department store that stood for nearly 40 years in what is now Millerton’s Antiques Center, seemed to carry almost everything a resident might need.
“You could find everything from a set of dishes to a shotgun,” he recalled.
The rise of shopping malls changed that kind of downtown retail, he said, but Millerton has remained a lively commercial village.
“For us, it’s been a great place to have business,” Hermans said. “It’s a busy village.”
For Hermans, running a store was never simply about selling books and records. It was a way of being part of a place.
Music has remained another constant. Hermans continues to sell music at Oblong and hosts the radio program “New Harmony” on WKZE. The business of selling music has changed dramatically over the years, particularly with the rise of streaming, but Hermans has adapted.
He was initially reluctant to bring vinyl records back into the store because of their expense. But about four or five years ago, he began stocking LPs again, and they have become the main form of music the store sells.
He finds that many of the customers buying them are reconnecting with music they loved years ago.
“I do best with classic albums that people may have had when they were young,” he said. “And now that they’re retired, they want to hear it again.”
Hermans still reviews between 700 and 1,200 new music releases each week through the store’s distributor, Alliance Entertainment, carefully deciding what belongs on Oblong’s shelves.
That same commitment to place has led Hermans into a wide range of community projects. His work with the Harlem Valley Rail Trail is among the efforts he mentions when reflecting on his years of civic involvement. He has also served on the school board and has been involved with the Millerton Business Alliance and the Irondale Schoolhouse. He is now involved with The New Pine Plains Herald, which he sees as complementary to the work of The Millerton News and The Lakeville Journal.
“I really think that the important thing about this award is that people understand what a newspaper does to connect them to their community,” he said. “And if that means anything to their lives, they gotta support it.”
Hermans knew Mary Lou and Robert Estabrook and remembers them as people who were deeply conscious of their responsibilities to the community.
“They were really nice folks,” he said. “They were very conscious of what their role in the community was.”
There is, in fact, still plenty on his plate. Hermans admits he needs to scale back because he has taken on more than his current abilities can comfortably accommodate.
“To be given this award is very special,” he added. “But I don’t feel like I’m done.”
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Adamah Farm crew members planning out the day’s tasks on a late September day.
Janna Siller
Over my 15 years of growing vegetables in Falls Village, I’ve exerted my will over all kinds of conditions, from drought to humidity to crows with a taste for cantaloupe. That’s what farming is all about. You zip around the field, hopping on and off tractors, moving hoses and chasing weeds, all in an effort to arrange conditions in favor of your crops. It is the crops’ job to gulp up sunlight and move water through their stems, to transform solar energy into your next pesto or ratatouille or butternut squash soup. It is the job of the farmer to irrigate just enough but not too much, to slice dandelion leaves without damaging delicate cabbage roots, to pander and pamper and stay in tune with what plants need to thrive.
The easy part of farming is trusting plants’ resilience. I have seen bright green shoots barrel ahead out of a plant torn to shreds by hail. I’ve watched wilty, heat-stressed seedlings turn rigid overnight and greet the next morning with vigor. The hard part is letting go of what you can’t control. As our crops lapped up Friday’s gentle sunshine and I considered the weekend forecast, I imagined roots holding tight to wet earth and branches supporting each other in sideways, pelting rain. I made sure all of our storage crops were already harvested and tucked away. I battened down the sides of our greenhouses and wished the remaining field crops good luck.
The nor’easter didn’t materialize too dramatically in our corner of New England. A few broken branches and debris blown about, nothing like the July Fourth storm that sent half a tree crashing onto the deer fence and left crates of fresh veggies in coolers without power.
Fall storage crop harvests amid soil building cover crops at Adamah Farm in Falls Village. Janna Siller
Farming is an exercise in acceptance. To do it well and return year after year, you have to balance hubris and humility. The prize can often be a certain equanimity, a training in the art of moving into the next day even when the last one scrambled all your plans.
Epic change is not always about the unexpected. It also comes like clockwork on the seasonal calendar. As I type, the last of summer’s watermelons wait naively on the vine for a few hot days to finish ripening. Broccoli are holding their leaves wide as they did in June and July, only to find that the hours of sunlight decrease with each earlier sunset. Plants can’t pick up and go south or call the manager to order a bonus round of sunshine. Their growth slows and they get a resigned look to the hue of their leaves, so different from the frenzied growth of summer.
The release of fall is not tragic or gloomy. It is not an ending because so many fall tasks are about setting up for the new beginnings in spring.
We turn the vines that yielded thousands of pounds of fruit into the soil, where healthy microbes feast on their rotting stems. Then we plant cover crops — a mix of cereal grains like rye and oats and legumes like peas, vetch and clover. Cover crops hold the soil and its nutrients in place over winter, feeding the soil food web and adding organic matter that next season’s crops will need to grow.
We sort sprinklers and repair hoses. We inventory tarps. We take notes about which plants did well where and how we might try a new approach for this or that. We stack crates of cured garlic and onions and winter squash in a cool, dark room.
We save seeds from tomatoes and beans and lettuce, carefully labeling each variety for next season’s long, sunny days.
Janna Siller is the farm director at Adamah, a community farm in Falls Village offering CSA shares, educational programs and a food access program.
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