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Letter: Leaf blowers

     After I retired last fall, I was dismayed to learn that on any given day of the week, one of my neighbors or their gardeners was using a gas-powered leaf blower. Leaf blowers don’t eliminate dust, leaves and clippings; they just move them from one location to another. Turns out much of the time the dust ends up on my property or in my house, if I should be so foolish as to leave a window open.
     In addition to the fact that the noise decibel level they produce is somewhere between a rock concert and a jet engine (and in Canyon Lake I was told they can start as early as 6 a.m.), they also do incredible damage to the environment. Check out these statistics, readily available on the Internet: they propel annually, at 200 miles an hour, 540 million gallons of raw unburned two-stroke fuel into the California air, 18 million tons of dust, (are you asthmatics listening?) and, for you global warming zealots, 18 million tons of carbon dioxide.
     The following upscale communities are some which have banned leaf blowers: Carmel, La Quinta, Del Mar, Palo Alto, Claremont, Santa Barbara, Beverly Hills, Laguna Beach and Indian Wells. Even Los Angeles! Obviously, their city councils know something ours doesn’t.
     Larry Ronnow
     

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