Fire Facts

Floor Speech

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Mr. WESTERMAN. Mr. Speaker, fires are ravaging the West. I want to talk a little bit about what is going on with the fires, and I want to talk about what is not going on here in Congress.

To start with, I just want to take a quick look at the science of fire.

This fire triangle shows that three things are required to have a fire. You have to have fuel, heat, and oxygen.

There is a lot of talk about the role climate change is playing in these fires. Climate increasing temperatures can draw fuel. If it gets windy, you can have more oxygen. Lightning can be one of the things to ignite fires, but a lot of fires obviously are ignited by man-made ways.

When we talk about putting out fire, the first thing we do is try to get the fuel out of the way, or we use water to cool the fire and remove the oxygen. But we have to spend way too much time working on extinguishing fires when we can take the actions to reduce the fuel to reduce the fires.

Any time I talk about forest management, I get accused of wanting to clear-cut the national forests, and I can promise you the last thing I want to do is clear-cut the national forests. I want to use good management on the national forests. That is what we should be doing. But I often wonder if those people who talk about clear-cutting even have any idea of what a clear-cut is.

I have put this chart together that shows a comparison between a clear-cut and a catastrophic wildfire, and I will go on the record and say that catastrophic wildfires are worse than clear-cuts.

Look at the data.

During a clear-cut, the trees are killed. During a catastrophic wildfire, the trees are killed.

During a clear-cut, the trees are removed. During a catastrophic wildfire, you are left with dead snags that can be fuel for additional wildfires. All vegetation is killed. That is what happens in a catastrophic wildfire. At least in a clear-cut you leave the residual grasses and the shrubs.

Stream zones are protected when a clear-cut is done. You leave vegetation around the stream. Catastrophic wildfire burns to the edge of the water.

Soil and organic materials are all burned up in a catastrophic wildfire. Special care is taken to protect the soil in a clear-cut.

When a clear-cut is planned, a plan for reforestation is also in place. Often on catastrophic wildfire, there is no reforestation.

As far as planting goes, it is extensive with a clear-cut. It is unplanned and uncontrolled in a catastrophic wildfire.

The size of a clear-cut, in California, it is less than 20 acres. Wildfires are huge, burning millions of acres. We have almost burned 8 million acres to date in the wildfire season this year in the U.S.

We can continue going down the list, but you can see, even talking about carbon, at least with a clear-cut, you are putting the wood into material that stores carbon. With a wildfire, you are releasing the carbon into the air. And these dead snags eventually rot. And they are not just releasing carbon dioxide like the fire does; they are releasing methane, which is a worse greenhouse gas.

Clear-cutting is not something that we want to do in a national forest, but people who are not allowing good forest management--and that is Congress with the rules that we have--are doing something much more devastating than clear-cutting by allowing these catastrophic wildfires to continue unabated.

Just as an example, this is the Angora fire. That is a natural clear- cut. That is a stand replacing fire.

This is 12 years later, where you have no regrowth on the site.

On top of that, according to the USGS, in 2018, the carbon emissions from wildfires released the same amount of carbon as the emissions that would be produced by generating enough electricity to power California for a whole year.

Mr. Speaker, we need to take action. It is not that the Forest Service doesn't know how to manage the land, it is that we have tied their hands and we have allowed activists and lawyers to manage the forests rather than the professionals in the Forest Service.

If we don't want to see the same things repeating over and over, with loss of life, loss of property, loss of a resource that actually pulls carbon dioxide out of the air and could be used to reduce the effects of climate change, we should do something proactive and actually start managing these forests.

It is time to act, and unfortunately, Congress has sat on their hands while we continue to watch the West burn.

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Mr. WESTERMAN. Mr. Speaker, I thank the gentleman from Arizona (Mr. Gosar) for being here tonight.

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Mr. WESTERMAN. Mr. Speaker, I thank the gentleman from Washington (Mr. Newhouse) for his comments tonight.

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Mr. WESTERMAN. Mr. Speaker, I thank the gentleman from Alabama (Mr. Palmer) for his comments.

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Mr. WESTERMAN. Mr. Speaker, I thank the gentleman from Pennsylvania (Mr. Thompson) for being here tonight.

Mr. Speaker, I just want to illustrate here that this isn't difficult. It is not rocket science.

This is a control in the first picture. You see all the underbrush, the ladder fuels. This is on Federal land as well.

You see the forest management in the middle where you thin it out, you do controlled burns. You do those every few years, and you get a resilient forest that looks like this.

California and Oregon and Arizona and Washington State, Nevada, they could have forests that look like this. Now, it would be those species that are out there, and the management would be done accordingly, but there is no reason we can't do this.

It is Speaker Pelosi's State that is on fire. It is Chairman Grijalva's State that is on fire. It is Chairman DeFazio's State that is on fire.

I wish that Democrats would take time to do what is right, to address these fires, to quit playing politics with relief bills that are going nowhere and do something that could really help the people and their States.

We want to help, but we can't do it on our own. We are in the minority.

We will work together and offer suggestions, but it is going to take a bipartisan effort to change these rules so that management can take place.

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