You sound so shocked. Are you sure you were a logger? lol
I wasn't a logger, I was an East Coast firewood woodchuck. They are a much lower subspecies.
I saw lots of rubbish fires on the landings for the guys to keep warm by. Logging never stops back where I come from, even 100" of snow will not keep guys out of the woods. I myself had some fires going when it was cold and that was exactly what ash trees are great for because they burn green.
But the dumping of the oil on the ground first and then trying to burn it was just not a good practice. It is not the logger's land to be polluting. I bet I can go to some of those landings 30 yearss after the fact and still find those burn pits because nothing grows on them. The woods behind my mom's house has one I can still see from the road it is so big, but that logger was a major tool. He let his equipment drip oil like it was free flowing.
I saw a few guys that burned some junk like oil but both of them had a pan they dragged around with them to put the fire in. They were smart to not let the oil run into the ground and thus not get the most BTUs out of it. They also burned used paint thinners and stuff like that. The pit just made it look like they cared about what they were doing but landowers liked that.
As woodcutters we are supposed to be good stewards of the land and all any enviromental whacko has to do is go up one of these burn piles and point out the oil and say "see, this is how much they care about the enviroment." Leaking equipment is another issue but that is not always up to the logger's control. But I have seen equipment dripping steady streams of oil out end as they pour good oil into the other. Two of the foresters I knew had a list of recommened loggers they liked to use, and both of those foresters paid attention to how the folks treated the landing (clean, organized, safe, no pollution/trash and most of all cleaned up when done), and the both also inspected the logger's equipment on a regular basis to see what state it was in (ie leaking oil and covered in gunk, etc). The loggers they worked with got some nice jobs in primo wood that other loggers never got a shot at, and it was because they were slobs.
One major furniture company in CNY that was known for buying cherry and maple logs and paying about 1.5X the normal going rates would not accept logs from loggers that did not run clean looking operations, or operations that trashed the woods with bad skidding practices. They considered the land that produced trees one of the things they needed to take care of because they had been in business for many, many decades, and they wanted to make sure the land would be there for them in the future. I heard they are still snobs, but they are still buying, 30 years later.
