Fall Bonfire Permit Lottery Limits Weekend Burns to 12; 900 Households Enter Drawing

EMBER FALLS — The Fire Marshal’s Office closed its fall bonfire permit lottery Friday with 900 households vying for 12 weekend burn permits, making the backyard bonfire “statistically harder to get than the leaf-peeping lottery, and the leaf-peeping lottery was 200-to-1,” said Fire Marshal Dan Okafor.

Winners receive one Saturday-night burn window, 6 p.m. to 10 p.m., a laminated permit, and a visit from what Okafor calls “a friendly pre-burn consultation,” in which a firefighter reviews the burn pile, the wind forecast, and “the neighbor situation.” Fires must be 25 feet from structures, attended at all times by a sober adult, and extinguished with “water, not optimism.”

“The 12-permit cap is about air quality, fire risk, and — frankly — the volume of ‘can I burn this couch’ questions we fielded last year,” Okafor said. Prohibited burn materials include treated lumber, tires, mattresses, and “anything that was once a boat.” One applicant’s burn plan listed “miscellaneous,” which Okafor said earned “an automatic interview.”

Non-winners were offered spots on the “Ember Waitlist” and invited to the town’s communal bonfire night, where a single supervised fire serves up to 400 residents. “It’s actually better,” Okafor said. “Somebody else buys the wood, the fire department is already there, and the s’mores table is professionally managed. Last year we did 900 s’mores with zero incidents, unless you count the great marshmallow fork shortage, which I do.”

The lottery will reopen for the winter burn season in January, when, Okafor noted, “demand drops to almost nothing, because standing around a fire in January is a young person’s game.”

The town’s communal bonfire night — one fire, 400 residents, professionally managed s’mores — has become the season’s hottest ticket precisely because it requires no ticket. Last year’s 900-s’more operation ran on a volunteer assembly line Okafor described as “a military-grade confectionery deployment,” with separate stations for chocolate, marshmallow, and graham cracker, plus a “burnt marshmallow amnesty bin” for the over-toasteds. “Nobody judges a burnt marshmallow at the communal fire,” Okafor said. “We’re all family there.”

The “can I burn this couch” question — asked, Okafor confirmed, “by more than one person, in writing” — has been immortalized on the permit application’s prohibited-materials list, where “furniture (all)” now appears in bold. One lottery winner, retiree Sal Moretti, called his burn night “the best $0 I ever spent,” noting the firefighter’s pre-burn consultation included “a wind forecast, a marshmallow toasting tutorial, and genuine concern about my neighbor situation.” His neighbor, reached for comment, said the fire was “beautiful, brief, and — I checked — fully permitted.”