Lawmakers pass ban on field burning

SALEM — Next year, residents of the southern Willamette Valley will experience a summer unlike any experienced in more than half a century.

It will be a summer free of the hazy skies and ominous pillars of smoke rising up from burning grass seed fields.

The Oregon Legislature Monday passed a ban on open field burning on the Willamette Valley floor. Except for some exempted areas east of Salem, the allowable acreage that can be open-burned will be halved to 20,000 this year and prohibited altogether in 2010.

The dramatic 31-29 House vote sent Senate Bill 528 to Gov. Ted Kulongoski for his expected signature. Once it is law, the bill will end an agricultural practice that since the 1940s has helped produce a crop of worldwide renown, while bedeviling generations of residents who have struggled with respiratory ills made worse by the fine, airborne particulate produced by thousands of acres of burning straw and stubble.