Leaf Blowers: Unhealthy for people and plants
by Nicholas Bryan
Are you bothered by noise and pollution from gas-powered leaf blowers? You’re not alone. According to The Quiet Communities Hamptons website “…the quality of life in the Hamptons is being degraded by the widespread use of leaf blowers and commercial gas-powered maintenance equipment. There’s no escaping the high-pitched, whining drone of leaf blowers; it penetrates walls and windows and disrupts entire neighborhoods. And furthermore, they pollute our air…. Things don’t have to be this way. We can preserve our environment, our health, and our quality of life by learning and taking action.”
Action is in fact being taken in many communities. Santa Monica, CA has banned leaf blowers based on a report from its Office of Sustainability and Environment, highlighted below.
Health Risks
All leaf blowers create unnecessary noise and air pollution, endangering you and the community. Gas-powered leaf blowers pose multiple health threats, including spreading airborne particles, provoking asthma and other respiratory diseases and generating potential pollutants like ozone, carbon monoxide, nitrogen oxides and hydrocarbons. Hearing damage and eye injuries from debris propelled by blowers are also cited.
Bad Air
Gas blowers blow herbicides, pesticides and fecal contaminants from the ground at a rate of 150 miles per hour, especially troubling asthmatics and allergy sufferers. Plus, a gas blower generates as much tailpipe emissions in an hour as an automobile driving 100 miles, but a car emits all that pollution over a big stretch of road, not in one yard.
Too Loud
A gas-powered leaf blower creates up to 70 decibels of nerve-racking noise at 50 feet, disturbing entire neighborhoods. Noise pollution from blowers also scares wildlife, especially birds. But those who operate leaf blowers at close range for many hours each working day are at greatest risk of hearing loss.
For professional landscapers, the health of plants and workers who tend them should make gas blowers a nonstarter. The following article from DrWeil.com, was written by Winifred Rosen, guest commentator (and long-time local landscaper/gardener).
Subjecting everything at ground level to blasts of hot, dry, hurricane-force winds would be ill-advised at any time, since it cannot fail to injure plants and open pathways for pests and disease…. In the summer, though, when the air is hot and the ground is dry and the plants are dehydrated and badly stressed to begin with, subjecting them to tornadic blasts of hot, dry air is, nonsensical, to put it kindly.
Leaf blowers literally scour the earth: stripping off topsoil, desiccating roots, and killing vital soil-dwelling organisms, while, at the same time, propelling into the air clouds of dirt, dust and dangerous contaminants: volatile compounds, mold and fungal spores, weed seeds, insect eggs, pollen, molecules of the myriads of toxic chemicals people spray and sprinkle on their gardens, trees and lawns, not to mention bird and rodent feces, and more.
My neighbor in Springs—a wonderful person—has a lawn contractor who sometimes uses two gas leaf blowers simultaneously. He asks the contractor to do lawn care during the week and is incensed when he hears neighbors’ leaf blowers operating on weekends.(I don’t own a leaf blower. I mulch some leaves and move others into the small wooded area on my property.) When asked, my neighbor said he would approve a regulation that limits the use of leaf blowers and bans them completely during the summer months when there are really no leaves to blow.
As I researched this article, I found no facts in favor of these machines. None of the cities that have banned blowers (including California’s Berkeley, Beverly Hills, Carmel, Los Angeles, Malibu and Palo Alto; Lincoln, MA and Rye, NY) show any evidence of resulting tax increases or financial hardship to landscapers.
In our own backyard, the Sag Harbor village board has proposed limiting hours and days when commercial leaf blowers can be operated. Southampton’s noise code includes a ban on the use of leaf blowers from Memorial Day to Labor Day; it is the only town in the Hamptons that has such a ban… so far.
In East Hampton, there was a proposal to deal with leaf blowers back in 2013. The proposal, Councilwoman Sylvia Overby said, was “difficult to understand and implement, so we really do have to go back to the drawing board. The level of noise in our society has gotten worse,” she added. “I think it is disturbing people’s quiet enjoyment of their property. I would welcome hearing from people and seeing a petition.” The Ban the Blowers website includes a link to an online petition, at the website change.org, to ask the town to ban leaf blowers.
It’s time for the citizens of East Hampton to develop solutions that fit our town. Ask the Town Board to address the issue. We’ll all be better off when this is accomplished and we’ll leave a healthier and quieter community for our children.
