Combating Wildfires in the Western United States

Floor Speech

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Mr. THOMPSON of Pennsylvania. Mr. Speaker, I thank the gentleman for his leadership. I congratulate him on some great legislation that was passed out of the Natural Resources Committee earlier today, which I know will be extremely important to the citizens who are lucky to have him as their Representative.

Mr. Speaker, I am proud to be here this evening. As vice chair of the Agriculture Committee and as a former chair of the House Forestry Subcommittee and a proud member of the Western Caucus--I always say I am on the eastern frontier of the Western Caucus, being from Pennsylvania, but we have the same issues. We really do.

I have a national forest, one of the more profitable national forests in the country, but facing a lot of the issues: rural communities, school districts that are dependent on secure rural schools, and just so many issues--energy production, development--and so I am proud to be here this evening on an issue that is incredibly important, an issue that impacts the lives of so many and heavily impacts our Western States.

I am honored to represent Pennsylvania, obviously, and as some have described our forest, Mr. Speaker, as asbestos forest in Pennsylvania, probably because of the 90-some-thousand miles of streams that we have. We have plenty of moisture. I wish we could put a bunch of that water in a pipeline and sell it to you. We would send it your direction.

But as it is, while the devastating impact on our forests is invasive species--that is a subject for another evening--I can tell you, when the wildfires occur in States such as Utah, Montana, Colorado, and throughout the West, California, these devastating wildfires, there is a large sucking sound, as I like to describe it, out of my national forest, and it comes in the form of resources, money that is taken away because of the necessity that I support of having to fight those fires.

We also have personnel that are deployed out of my national forest. So that means that our timber, the money for our timber marketing, and harvesting, and the multi-use comes almost to a screeching halt.

So I am pleased with the leadership that we have done, in both the Natural Resources Committee and the Agriculture Committee, to address this issue. As vice chair of the Agriculture Committee, I am proud of the Forestry Title of the House farm bill. It contains a number of reforms intended to provide the Forest Service and our private foresters with more authorities and flexibilities to help better manage; that is both in increasing timber production, but it is also in managing a forest that is healthy and, therefore, managing the understory, the fuel load that has built up over decades of mismanagement.

By providing new authorities and encouraging new timber markets, we do that in a number of ways, Mr. Speaker. The bill encourages active forest management. We reauthorize the Landscape Scale Restoration Program, and that allows for more partnerships to tackle critical challenges such as forest health, and wildfires, as well as drinking water protection.

The bill supports, in many ways, these types of initiatives but, specifically, on the wildfires, Mr. Speaker. Over the past 2 decades, wildfires have been an increasing challenge for the Forest Service as costs have skyrocketed to fight them.

Since 1995, the Forest Service's annual wildfire budget has increased from 13 percent of the budget to nearly 60 percent of the budget, Mr. Speaker. Last year was the costliest fire year on record, with the Forest Service spending $2.4 billion in 2017 alone.

Year after year, the agency runs out of fire funding, forcing it to draw additional funds from non-fire accounts and other forests, national forests, including to cover basic operational and forest management funds that pay for timbering, and research activities, and even proactive fire prevention.

Unfortunately, this occurs because the Forest Service has been unable to access additional funding when the fire funds runs out due to a budget cap.

Now, finally, the 2018 omnibus included a ``fire borrowing fix'' by creating a wildfire cap adjustment, which will treat wildfires like any other natural disasters; just like we saw down in the Carolinas with Hurricane Florence.

Now this change will free up the Forest Service to fight wildfires and do so without transferring funds from non-fire accounts. These are accounts that help to prevent fires with restorative cuts, and managing the understory, dealing with the fuel load, the standing dead timber because of, perhaps, disease.

For forests around the Nation, especially in the East, this will mean more funding for other essential activities such as management, timbering, and even recreation and research activities.

Now, along with fixing the budget cap, the omnibus currently provides the Forest Service with new management authorities, and these reforms are specifically intended to help the Forest Service better manage and proactively prevent forest fires from breaking out.

Specifically, these new authorities will streamline the environmental analysis, reduce litigation, and provide timber harvest contract certainty. Some of these reforms include, within our proposed farm bill--which we are in conference in right now, and we need the Senate to realize these improvements were based on the successes we had in the last farm bill, which has really helped our forest products industry, our timber industry, helped make our forests more healthy; and when they are healthy, they are more resilient to wildfires.

So it includes: Categorical Exclusions for Wildfire Resilience Projects; Healthy Forest Restoration Act inclusion of Fire and Fuel Breaks; 20-year Stewardship Contracts; Cottonwood Reform; Fire Hazard Mapping Initiative; Fuels Management for Protection of Electric Transmission Lines; and Good Neighbor Authority Road Amendment.

Forest fires do not recognize or respect boundaries. If they start in a national forest, they are going to wind up in State forests, they are going to wind up on private property land.

So we are doing all the right things. I am very pleased, and we need to do this.

When I look at the communities, such as the ones that the gentleman from Montana represent, as a result of wildfires, we see a loss of life; we see a loss of homes; a loss of the economy; a loss of the taxpayer-owned assets, whether it is national forests or State forests; and certainly a loss of assets for those private property owners that have forests.

So I thank the gentleman for his leadership on this topic and issue, and I really appreciate his managing this Special Order this evening on a very important topic of wildfires.

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Mr. THOMPSON of Pennsylvania. Nationwide impact.

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Mr. THOMPSON of Pennsylvania. It really is.

Mr. Speaker, our watersheds, most of our water sources start--many of them start in national forests. They are certainly in forests, but a lot of national forests. And with wildfires, you create a situation where there is no stability in the soils. And so where these wonderful trout streams, streams that support life, support communities, support families with clean water, these wildfires, they basically caramelize that soil so that, essentially, the flash flooding, the runoffs, it puts all these solids within those streams, it creates turbidity, the solids, the nutrients that go in there.

So the impact of wildfires, as the gentleman said, it is the land, it is the air and, quite frankly, it is the water, and that is why we have to do a better job of preventing these wildfires to start with.

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