Decatur, GA Fire Regulations: Outdoor Burning (2026)

Sec. B of the Unified Development Ordinance opens with a blanket prohibition: no person may cause, suffer, allow, or permit open burning of leaves, rubbish, or trash of any kind, or any other open burning, anywhere in the city. The section then lists the only permitted exceptions: cooking food for immediate human consumption; devices with open flames such as kettles, blow torches, welding torches, and portable heaters; small contractor and utility-work fires kept small during street paving or utility repair; land-clearing or right-of-way burns in non-residential areas, but only with winds blowing away from population, the burn site at least 1,000 feet from any structure or dwelling in a predominantly residential area, no heavy smoke-producing materials such as heavy oils, asphaltic materials, or rubber, and a certified burning apparatus attended by qualified personnel; fire department training burns supervised by the fire chief; and the separately conditioned chiminea and outdoor fireplace allowance.

Aerial luminaries, defined broadly as unattended free-floating devices capable of producing an open flame such as sky lanterns, flying luminaries, floating lanterns, and fire balloons, are prohibited outright with no exception. The section also separately bans selling, possessing, storing, or transporting gasoline in glass containers anywhere in the city. Because this sits within Sec. A's fire district, the boundary is set by the officially filed fire district map kept with the City Clerk, so applicability can turn on which side of that mapped line a property sits on.