Emergency Wildland Fire Response Act of 2008

Mr. Speaker, I yield myself as much time as I may consume.

Fire season is here and wildlands are in flames across the Nation as we speak. California is currently reporting 24 large fires, and along with California, there are large wildland fires burning in Arizona, Oregon, Washington, Virginia, and North Carolina.

Since January of this year, some 46,113 wildland fires have burned more than 2.71 million acres, destroying more than 461 residences, 15 commercial buildings, and 979 outbuildings. But it's not just property, homes, community, watersheds or livelihoods that are at stake when a wildland fire burns. Lives are also in danger, and since January of this year alone, eight firefighters have died while on duty to fight wildland fires.

For many areas of the country, the wildland fire season is just beginning.

This is an issue that I have familiarity with, as each year in Idaho the skies fill with smoke from fires. Last year alone, more than 2 million acres burned in Idaho, threatening lives, homes, and communities.

I commend the gentleman from West Virginia, my chairman, on his initiative to move a bill and bring this critical issue before the House of Representatives today. Real solutions to these deadly and growing wildfires must be found, and I appreciate his efforts to this end.

Regrettably, the bill before us today will not do enough to address the raging wildfires across this country. Communities, homes, and lives will remain at risk from wildland fires.

There is no question that there are budget issues that must be addressed. We require the Forest Service to fight these fires, while we have handcuffed that agency at the same time, whether through its budget or with forest management practices.

Over and over again on this floor, we have had discussions of how to pay for the measures that are passed by this body. And yet, the Forest Service used to provide a source of revenue. It used to manage Federal lands, selling the harvested timber and thereby bringing in revenue.

Today, in most areas, active harvesting and forest management is nonexistent on Federal lands. This has had a twofold effect. There's less and less money generated by the Forest Service, while there are also ever-growing fuel loads on federally managed lands.

I agree that we cannot expect an agency to budget for the very large wildland fires that we have seen develop over the last 6 or 7 years. To do that is something like asking an American family not only to budget for ordinary and foreseeable expenses, like dental care, health care and car repairs, but also to budget for a serious car accident or tragic health crisis that would eat up 50 percent of their entire budget for the year.

Yet that is the point we have reached with the Forest Service. Today, roughly 48 percent of the Forest Service's budget is dedicated to wildland fires, but we still expect the Service to be able to budget for these fires.

We agree there is a problem with the funding. Unfortunately, this bill doesn't fix that problem. While well-intended, this bill fails to correct the 10-year funding average problem we currently face. Even if it did, merely erasing and rewriting lines in a ledger book does nothing to fix the crisis on the ground in federally managed lands. Moving money to different accounts will not solve the problem.

While well-intentioned, unfortunately the bill before us today fails to address the more critical issue, forest management. The greatest obstacle our public land managers face in preventing catastrophic wildfires isn't dollars, it is having the ability to overcome mountains of red tape and lawsuits filed by extremists. The laws that Congress has created in an attempt to save our forests have now become the biggest obstacles to saving them from wildfires.

Congress should not be addressing funding for suppressing these large fires without addressing the cause of these large fires as well, the increasing and unchecked fuel loads in our national forests that surround or are adjacent to homes and communities.

The critical link between pre-fire forest management and fire fighting was illustrated at the hearing we had on this bill in the Natural Resources Committee in April.

During that hearing, Arizona Governor Jane Napolitano, a Democrat, testified that the 2006 woody fire near Flagstaff, Arizona, was halted before it reached 100 acres because of the hazardous fuels treatment that had been done in that area. And according to Governor Napolitano, those treatments dramatically minimized the fire's devastation.

Similarly, during that hearing our colleague Norm Dicks testified about the large fuel loads that continue to accumulate in Federal forests.

He pointed out that the larger fires have resulted from increasing tree density and fuel loads.

We will continue to have larger and larger fires until we reduce fuel-loading. Until we provide the tools for pre-fire forest management to reduce fuel-loading, the western United States will

continue to see homes burn, watersheds destroyed, and even lives lost. We must provide the tools to preempt these devastating fires, the kind of preemption pointed to by Governor Napolitano that protected so many people and homes in the 2006 Woody Fire near Flagstaff.

Last year, during the Poe Cabin fire in Idaho, in one area the fire moved some three miles in a mere 20 minutes. In that area, several homes that had defensible space around them due to fuel reductions on private land survived the fire, while other structures in that area without defensible space did not survive.

One of these homeowners was able to get his wife out while he stayed just a bit longer to finish loading his truck. However, because of the fast-moving and intense fire combined with the heavy fuel-loading on Federal ground, he became trapped by the fire and was unable to leave. While this could have quickly become a tragic story, this man lived and his home survived thanks to the fuel reduction that had been done around his home.

While this was a result of the fuel reduction done wholly on private ground, many communities and individuals abutting these forests do not have the luxury of enough land to adequately protect the communities, watersheds, homes and lives. Providing the tools to these communities to protect their homes, livelihoods and very lives from these devastating fires is something we can and must do when addressing long- term funding to suppress the fires. We should be discussing solutions like the one I proposed, H.R. 4245, to provide the agencies with one more tool to reduce hazardous fuel loads around communities and homes.

In the great State of Idaho, many communities have put the time and energy into developing Community Wildfire Protection Plans, but implementation of many of these plans has been significantly delayed in large part because of the NEPA process. These CWPPs, as my colleagues know, are cooperative plans, requiring community collaboration and input in the formation of the plan. By delaying treatment for the safety of communities through unbelievable red tape, we subject these communities to be threatened by large wildfires.

Mr. Speaker, this is not only a bipartisan issue, this is a nonpartisan issue. It's about public safety and sound forest management that will benefit millions of Americans. My bill, which I would urge this body to take up as it addresses these wildland fires, would provide for a categorical exclusion from the NEPA process to provide another tool for timely treatments to protect these communities from large and devastating fires and preserve our pristine national forests. Too many homes have burned and too many lives have already been lost. We must provide real tools for firefighting.

With that, Mr. Speaker, I would reserve the balance of my time.

Mr. Speaker, I yield 5 minutes to the gentleman from Oregon (Mr. Walden).

I yield the gentleman an additional 30 seconds.

Mr. Speaker, I yield 4 minutes to the gentlewoman from North Carolina (Ms. Foxx).

Mr. Speaker, I yield back the balance of my time.

Mr. Speaker, I move to suspend the rules and pass the bill (H.R. 5541) to provide a supplemental funding source for catastrophic emergency wildland fire suppression activities on Department of the Interior and National Forest System lands, to require the Secretary of the Interior and the Secretary of Agriculture to develop a cohesive wildland fire management strategy, and for other purposes, as amended.

Mr. Speaker, I ask unanimous consent that all Members may have 5 legislative days in which to revise and extend their remarks and include extraneous material on the bill under consideration.

Mr. Speaker, I yield myself such time as I may consume.

Mr. Speaker, this year's fire season in California started in unprecedented fashion, when 1,700 fires erupted in a 48-hour period beginning June 21. Already, just over 3 weeks later, fires have burned more than 960 square miles in California.

And as of yesterday afternoon, 330 fires were still actively burning there, when citizens received the ominous warning that conditions are right for, as the National Weather Service described it, ``explosive fire growth.''

Our thoughts and prayers are with the people of Big Sur, Santa Barbara County, and other areas up and down the coast, who are experiencing devastating wildfires as we speak.

Those California fires are only the most recent example of the dramatic and tragic expansion of our Nation's wildland fire season. For the last decade, the United States has experienced a growth in the destructive nature of fire seasons that have taken American lives, eliminated homes and businesses, and scorched thousands of acres of our treasured public lands.

And this is not only occurring in the West. I well recall several years ago when the New River Gorge in my home State of West Virginia was burning. I had the honor to meet with Federal firefighters who flew in from across the country to battle the blazes.

Indeed, the Federal Government has, time and time again, answered the call and mobilized legions of brave firefighters to beat back the flames and protect our lands and our communities.

But as a result, the government has also dramatically shifted spending priorities, rapidly increasing funding for fire fighting, while axing moneys for other necessary programs. And ironically, some of those programs that have been gutted were created to actually prevent fires.

There is little reason to hope that fire seasons for the foreseeable future will be any less catastrophic than those of the last decade. The trend has certainly been working toward more destruction. Knowing that, we must be better prepared.

The FLAME Act, which my colleagues Mr. Raul Grijalva, Mr. Norm Dicks and myself introduced, is an effort to correct course, to get out in front at the start of these fire seasons.

The bill has received broad, bipartisan support from 56 Members of Congress, including the ranking member of our Natural Resources Committee, Mr. Young.

As well, it enjoys the support of the five former Chiefs of the Forest Service, the National Association of State Foresters, the National Association of Counties, the National Federation of Federal Employees, the Western Governors' Association, and nearly 40 other organizations.

Within the Forest Service, wildland fire activities now account for approximately 48 percent of the agency's budget, causing the Service to cut back on other important programs to cover the escalating costs of fire suppression.

The FLAME Act would help to address that funding problem, as well as the funding issues faced by other Federal agencies that are contributing funds from their limited accounts to fight these fires.

The Act would establish a dedicated Federal fund for catastrophic, emergency wildland fire suppression activities, separate from appropriated agency fire fighting funding.

The bill would also require the Forest Service and the Department of the Interior to present to Congress a long-overdue, comprehensive strategy for combating wildland fire, a strategy that would address the troubling shortcomings in the agencies' response to fires as identified by the Government Accountability Office and the Agriculture Department's Inspector General.

I cannot overstate the importance of today's action on the FLAME Act. Without a doubt, this is one of the most serious issues facing our Federal land management agencies, and it is one that, if not addressed properly and appropriately, will continue to cost homes, businesses, communities, public lands, and American lives.

The FLAME Act will allow the Forest Service and the Department of the Interior to respond to these dangerous fires while also accomplishing other important aspects of their missions, including those that will prevent fires from devastating our communities in the future.

I ask my colleagues to support passage of the FLAME Act.

I reserve the balance of my time.

Mr. Speaker, I yield 2 minutes to the gentleman from California, an individual who has some firsthand experience with these fires, Mr. Sam Farr.

I yield the gentleman an additional 30 seconds.

Mr. Speaker, I'm very happy to yield 2 minutes to a very valued member of our Committee on Natural Resources, the gentlelady from California (Mrs. Capps), and commend her for her assistance in developing this legislation as well.

Mr. Speaker, in response to the last speaker, this gentleman certainly joins with her in commending our firefighters, especially those who have volunteered across our Nation to fight these fires where they occur. Our firefighters, as they showed us on 9/11, are certainly on the forefront of our Nation's defense and our first responders in this country.

In regard to the price of gas, though, let me remind the gentlewoman that when President George Bush took office, the price of gas, according to his own Energy Information Agency, was $1.47. The last time I left West Virginia yesterday morning, it was $4.14 a gallon.

Mr. Speaker, I am very honored to yield now such time as she may consume to the distinguished Speaker of the House of Representatives, Ms. Pelosi.

I urge support of the bill.

Mr. Speaker, I yield back the balance of my time.

Mr. Speaker, I come to the floor today in support of this legislation and feel that it's a good first step. Unfortunately, it doesn't do quite what it was supposed to do, which was to really wall this off as emergency funding and address the problem. But it does authorize the money. It does set up a separate budget account.

Today in the Forest Service they spend 47 percent of their budget fighting fire. And for many years I've argued on this floor that what happens is we get the fire season, the Forest Service runs out of money, so then they rob from all the accounts where they had the projects in place to do the thinning to reduce the threat of fire for the next year. And then time runs out in the season, they can't do those projects, and we get fire. And then we restore the money as a Congress, and we repeat the cycle.

And today in America there are tens of millions, if not hundreds, of acres of Federal forest land that are subject to catastrophic fire, disease and bug infestation. If you're concerned about global warming and think carbon additions to the atmosphere are the problem, then you need to know that every year 290 million metric tons of carbon dioxide go into our atmosphere from forest fires. That's the equivalent of 4 to 6 percent of the Nation's carbon dioxide emissions from fossil fuel burning.

This portrait here is a picture of Judge Steve Grasty, a Democrat in my district, his grandkids. And they're standing out in the Egley fire after it occurred in Harney Country. This fire burned well over 100,000 acres in an area that obviously needed thinning and hadn't been thinned.

And that's part of what brings me to the floor today, not only to support this bill--because I think it makes sense to have a separate firefighting budget, I think it makes sense to identify the most highest risk areas that need the treatment and to go in and treat them and to help the communities with grants and the things that are in this bill--but we need to do more than that because we should have learned the lesson that a treated forest is a healthier forest.

When we collectively passed the Healthy Forest Restoration Act and signed into law by President Bush in 2003, the Forest Service began to have the tools to expedite the treatments in the wildland urban interface. And the collaborative process my colleague from Idaho talked about that brought together the Community Wildfire Protection Planning Program allowed them to go outside the 1.5 mile around the community, and the community decided what needed to be treated.

The problem in my region, region six in the northwest, the great forest of America, is that most of the fires--over 1,400 of them in 2007--started up in the ridge lines and deep in the forest. Only a dozen or two dozen started right around the wildland urban interface.

The foresters who are the trained scientists that deal with fire environment tell me they need to take that Healthy Forest Restoration authority we gave them as a Congress in a bipartisan way

and expand it out into the Condition Class 2 and 3 lands, the lands determined by the scientists to be most out of whack with balance in nature, to go in and do the thinning. And we know where that occurs, fire behaves differently. And you all from California know very clearly, this is the kind of fire you have today, it sweeps through these areas that are overstocked, bug-infested, disease-ridden, dried out and can't handle fire. This is the same area of that fire, the Squire's Peak Fire, that had been treated.

This area that's burning is the area they hadn't treated yet. This is the difference. Look at the green growth here. The fire went through under the brush that had been treated, and it's fine. This picture, by the way, was shot by the last guy doing treatment as they drove away from the fire. They were out doing the treatment, and then they turned into firefighters and he shot that out of the back of his rig.

So I think we need to move forward with different legislation. This is good legislation: Pass it; get it over to the Senate; declare it an emergency; do this funding piece. But we need to do more. If you want to deal with these fires that are setting records for how much they consume, not only of the taxpayers' purse, but of our Nation's resource, habitat, watershed, look at the greenhouse gases, the smoke, the pollutants in the atmosphere, then we have to be able to give our forest managers the tools that they've proven can work in a collaborative way around communities and extend those out into the great reserves, the forests that are Condition Class 2 and 3.

And so I hope we can build a bipartisan coalition to do that. And I hope the chairman of the Resources Committee will help us on that. Because if we don't, then the change that's occurring in our climate with temperature will only cause these forests to grow more drought- ridden, more disease-ridden, more bug-infested, more likely to burn up in fire. And I'll tell you what, when you go back to this picture, Judge Grasty's grandkids, this is what's left behind. This is not snow, this is ashen, destroyed ground. These are the trees which, by the way, may never get hard.

So we can do better. We can be better stewards of our Nation's forest. We owe it, as our legacy to the future, to be good stewards today. But we can't do it with the laws that are in place that impede the work. I mean, we owe it. I can't be more passionate about this. And I've worked with many of you in a bipartisan way to pass the Healthy Forest Restoration Act and the Forest Emergency Recovery and Research Act, which the Senate failed to take up last Congress. We've got to do better than we're doing now.

This is a good little step forward in terms of managing the money so that the forest workers can do their work. We need to do more.

I thank the gentleman for yielding. I thank him and Mr. Sali for their leadership in bringing this important legislation to the floor in a timely fashion for us in California. I appreciate the good work of their committee.

Mr. Speaker, California today is fighting some of the most significant fires in terms of acres burned in our history, more than 675,000 acres, as the fires that have cost $276 million to fight, according to the State and Federal reports, to date. The number of active wildfires up and down the coast of California is 330. There have been 1,731 fires since June 21.

Up to 20,000 firefighters are battling the blazes, many of them from neighboring States, many from far and wide across the country. Some from other countries, from Mexico, from Canada, from Australia, and New Zealand and other places, coming to the rescue. Later today we will have a resolution offered by my colleague from California (Mr. Farr), whose district is greatly impacted by these fires, a resolution to commend our firefighters, thank them for their service and their sacrifice, and that will be an important resolution and debate at that time.

But in addition to extending our sympathy to those for their losses and our appreciation to our firefighters, we have to do more. And today, Mr. Rahall, you have given us the opportunity to do just that.

This legislation, the FLAME Act, before us creates an emergency Federal fund dedicated solely to combating the catastrophic wildfires. This funding will help ensure that fire prevention resources are not consumed by emergency firefighting expenses. Others have spoken about the need for us to even go beyond this act in terms of treatment and prevention, but this act is important because this fund will prevent the soaking up of all of the other dollars that should be used for prevention but are used for extinction.

The FLAME Act also requires the administration to develop a cohesive wildfire management strategy. This is very, very important and long overdue. We need prevention. We need the treatment that was described by our colleague. A long-term strategy is needed and should include approaches to hiring and retaining experienced Federal wildland firefighters. We have enormously talented people in our country. We want many of them to work for the Federal Government, and that's why I oppose the administration's insistence on outsourcing and other policies that undercut the Federal workforce which extend to our wildland firefighters.

I want to commend Mr. Rahall, whose leadership on the Natural Resources Committee is helping to strengthen efforts to better prepare for and combat wildfires, Mr. Sali as well, for bringing this legislation to the floor; Chairman Raul Grijalva of the Natural Resources Committee's National Parks, Forests and Public Lands Subcommittee; and Chairman Norm Dicks of the Appropriations Subcommittee on the Interior. These outstanding leaders have brought forward bipartisan legislation that will help us fight future catastrophic fires and ensure that sufficient resources are dedicated to protecting both citizens and property. That is why this legislation has such broad bipartisan support and has been endorsed by five former chiefs of the Forest Service, the National Association of State Foresters, the National Association of Counties, the National Federation of Federal Employees, the Western Governors Association, and nearly 40 other leading organizations.

As I said earlier, our colleague Congressman Farr is to be commended for authoring the resolution the House will consider shortly that commends our firefighters from California and throughout America for their courageous service. As we thank our colleagues for this much- needed legislation, we should also honor the service of our firefighters, the California Office of Emergency Services, the National Guard for helping protect our neighbors' lives and homes in California and throughout the West.

We also express our deepest sympathies to those who have suffered deep personal losses as a result of these fires, particularly the families of two firefighters who lost their lives: Robert Roland of the Anderson Valley Fire Department, a volunteer fireman who lost his life fighting a fire; and John Hermo of Oregon. He came down from Oregon to help fight the fires. He was drowned while off duty but, nonetheless, here in the service of this important fight.

This critical legislation is an opportunity to provide consistent assistance and structure for relief in these times of emergency. Again, we express our appreciation to the legislation's authors and hopes that the weather and the wind will assist our brave firefighters in combating the blazes. I know we all join in saying that we wish God will bless our courageous firefighters.

Mr. Speaker, I rise today to express my disappointment with the bill before us today, H.R. 5541, the Forest Land Assistance, Management, and Enhancement Act or the FLAME Act. Mr. Speaker, I believe that the authors of this bill are well intentioned and truly want to solve the wildfire funding problem, but, sadly, the FLAME Act does not provide the comprehensive solution needed to adequately resolve this problem.

With the unhealthy conditions in our forests, extreme drought, and the increasing influx of people building in fire-prone areas, the size and severity of wildfires has dramatically increased. In the 1990s, an average of 3.2 million acres burned each year. Since 2000, that annual average has doubled to 7.1 million acres. The cost of fighting these wildfires has skyrocketed, from averages of $400 million annually in the 1990s to roughly $1.4 billion in 2007. This year an area roughly the size of Connecticut has already burned, at cost of over $665 million to date.

This is not just a western issue. In my home State of Virginia, more acres have burned already this year than in any single entire year since 1963 at a cost of millions of dollars.

As firefighting costs have increased, the overall USDA Forest Service and Department of the Interior budgets have not. So, the Forest Service and DOI are footing the bill for these large, unpredictable emergency wildfires within the confines of a flat budget. For the Forest Service, this has meant a 77 percent increase in fire expenditures, a 23 percent decrease in funds to manage the national forests, and a 38 percent decrease in funds to help States and private owners manage their forests. Whether you're a wilderness advocate, a hunter, a mountain biker, or a logger, everyone will be impacted if we don't solve this problem.

Wildfires are not only consuming more forestland, they are consuming the Forest Service and the Department of the Interior themselves.

The FLAME Act falls short of protecting the Agencies' budgets from this continued erosion. H.R. 5541 does not change the current budget practice of funding firefighting based on the average expenses over the previous decade. Without this change, we will continue to see more and more of the Agencies' budgets go toward fire and less towards taking care of our Nation's forests.

In addition to this shortfall, the FLAME Act lacks a comprehensive set of solutions to the problem. Fixes to the wildfire budgeting system must be accompanied by strong cost containment and accountability standards while also ensuring firefighter safety, incentives to encourage communities to step up to the plate and reduce wildfire risks, and more tools to prevent or minimize damage due to catastrophic wildfires, particularly in our Federal forests.

H.R. 5648, the Emergency Wildland Fire Response Act of 2008 which Chairman Peterson and I introduced along with a bipartisan group of our colleagues, provides this comprehensive solution. Unfortunately, negotiations for a more comprehensive solution were cut short.

I'm pleased to see that the authors of the FLAME Act have incorporated aspects of H.R. 5648 that encourage communities to step up to the plate and become ``fire-ready'' and encourage the Agencies to contain costs in their firefighting efforts.

Unfortunately, even with these improvements, the FLAME Act ignores the underlying problem causing the increases in firefighting costs--the unhealthy condition of our Federal forests. We will continue to see skyrocketing firefighting costs and more damage to our forests, watersheds, and communities unless we take steps to reduce fire risk in our Federal forests. We must provide the Agencies additional tools to get our Federal forests in a healthy, more fire resilient condition.

My alternative bill, H.R. 5648 provides a new contracting tool for the Forest Service to partner with States to address these unhealthy conditions in Federal forests. This authority has been tested in Colorado and Utah where it's proven to be very effective. Unfortunately, H.R. 5541 contains no such tools.

Mr. Speaker, as California and other States are dealing with massive wildfires even as we speak, we shouldn't squander our time with legislation that is only half the solution. H.R. 5541 is akin to using the watering can to fight a wildfire: it might have some short-term benefit of slowing down the flames, but ultimately, it won't stop the fire.

That being said, I will vote for this bill because it does move the ball forward. I'm hopeful that we can improve it as we move forward and ask my colleagues to join me in this effort.